How will my website run on different devices?
How many devices have you got?
Before I started OCTA in 1997 the company I left behind employed 600 people around the world with 300 in the UK HQ. We had just 2 (yes two) pc’s connected to the Internet. One was connected to CompuServe for downloading software patches from the US and the second had a copy of Netscape Navigator (that’s a browser in case there are any youngsters reading this) and groups of us would huddle round and marvel at hyperlinked text, pictures and gratuitous animated clipart.
We’ve moved on from the ratio of 1 device per 200 employees where today 3 or 4 devices per individual is commonplace, such as laptop/desktop, smartphone, iPod, iPad.
What size should I build my website?
Different sizes depending on the device. Modern browsers on smartphones make such a good job of displaying content that we just need to worry about laying out content so that it looks good regardless of whether the screen is 480 pixels wide or 1920 pixels.
Do I need to build multiple websites, one for each device?
Probably not. It’s hard enough building one site! However because we store the content in a CMS it would be easy to display a subset of content for mobile devices compared to full content on pc’s.
But the best approach is to detect the screen width of the device and style the content accordingly. For example on a pc you could put the navigation buttons on top, followed by a big photo with the text underneath. For a smaller screen on a mobile you could display the text first, skip the photo and have the navigation underneath.
Try this site on a smartphone.
Don’t forget printers
There’s nothing more frustrating than web prints that chop off the last third of the page and use up the remaining juice in your £30 inkjet cartridge. We build sites that have alternate print layouts.
Try a print preview of this page.