To make web designing easier and effective, we must look at website designing in five total dimensions. These dimensions include height, width, site, hardware and software. Sites that embrace this complexity while designing lead to increase their efficiency as well as competitive advantage. Although this may seem confusing right now, a sharp mindset makes it very easy to design websites. Let us elaborate on each dimension for your better understanding of web designing:
1) Height and Width
Fluid or liquid websites are those sites that stretch to fit different browser sizes, have been around forever. They were not that much of hype until the recent era. In this recent era, there has been an explosion of mobile phones and mobile phone users. This has made fluid websites more attracting than ever.
Responsive Design might be the new buzzword of this mobile phone era, but media queries are the actual one which involves in the new tech. Media queries let you do a lot of things including serving CSS specific to the situation and show a different number of columns for different screen sizes. It’s easy as long as your design process is willing to accommodate it because it is much easier to design a layout where the number of columns can change than it is to take a whole layout and figure out how to compress it onto a mobile phone. This is the reason why it is a good idea to design your mobile experience first.
2) Time
Every website has a different purpose but one this is constant, which is, the importance of good content. Content is the ultimate thing that will convey your message to the people who visits your website and it tends to expand and change. The web has the ability of vertically-scrolling down sites for this reason. Thus, there is infinite room to expand vertically when new content is added, just as the site can stretch horizontally when the browser is resized. Every time the content changes, you must make sure that the navigation of the website still makes sense. For example, if you already have “Cocktails” to your website menu and you’re adding “Beers”, it is much more considerate for you to put both of them under “Drinks”. It is not advised that you just add new things wherever there’s space in your website or eventually, the website will result as a cluttered mess. There are two parts to this: One is changing the design according to the change in content and the other is to design your website in such a way that you can accommodate change into it pretty easily. A good design is ready to evolve and accommodate new changes.
3) Hardware
It is true that we are used to varying screen resolutions, but, displays are things that are increasingly variable in even more ways. With different aspect ratios, pixel densities, and physical sizes, it has become impractical to design for specific configurations. It’s more important to focus on adaptability in general. You just have to make sure that the font sizes are big enough on small screens. Also, touch input is a major thing to consider for mobile, and even for some non-mobile displays. It’s important for the website to use large enough touch targets for the convenience of the consumers that visit your website.
4) Software
Different browsers and especially different versions of browsers have their own different features. But one thing about newer browser software which is advantageous for you is that it does not totally break the page when the particular browser does not support it. This is done through progressive enhancement. Progressive enhancement is a process, or more of a strategy that starts with the basic content of the website and functionality of the page and this works anywhere. After this, layering on enhanced features is activated when and if it is supported by that version of the browser.
If you want your web design and development to prove its efficiency and worth, the ultimate test of Progressive Enhancement is to view your website with a screen reader. Either that or at least a browser with JavaScript and CSS disabled. If your website is still useable and promotes the content, you are probably on the correct path.
Here’s to hope that the aforementioned tips will help you understand a new dimension of web designing.
