Anyone who embraces responsive webdesign is stupid

This thread is a joke without seeing the content.

Off topic
Take a look at how I have approached a similar problem:
my site

Exactly. Post a link or continue to waste

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It’s about context. You have to give a little thought to what’s going to be important to someone using a phone. The chances are that they will be away from a larger display, so focus on aspects such as location, contact details, links to maps, daily offers/specials and so on - these are the things a smart phone lends itself well to, as it has things like GPS and motion tracking built-in, and of course, it is a phone as well. Think about what customer might be doing when they are out and about, what scenario might they be in when they find they need to search for a garage (for example); do they need tyres, have they broken down and need recovery - what services might our theoretical garage offer to assist with that.

Don’t exclude the articles you have, but when someone is out and about, it’s perhaps not their first priority. That said, don’t eliminate the possibility that your prospective customer might not want to find out more whilst they’re in a waiting room whilst those tyres go on. Does the waiting room have a free WiFi they can tap into? The customer might need to know that.

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Why don’t you like hamburger menus?

And how is having links different or better?

Only for those who struggle to think abstractly… :wink:

@chrisofarabia,

Excellent post!!

Exactly the kind of abstract thinking I was looking for on here!! :thumbsup:

I think your ideas make perfect sense for my current client who does auto repair.

No, for the site I was working on - which has no physical presence and is purely content - I think the answer/fix still needs some more thinking.

But for a lot of websites - and those where there is a physical store - I like your ideas!! :smile:

More precisely, for those that only think abstractly

The light shines forth upon the rippling waters, what is cast is reflected

I assumed the features @chrisofarabia suggested would already have been included and essential facts not omitted . No wonder the article has not achieved a good Google Ranking. Google’s expertise and strictness has managed to outclass other search engine companies by offering the best search results.

It is ever so easy to pass comment when viewing the page content and far easier to suggest further improvements if the relevant page was available.

I wonder what else has been overlooked?

I think we’re heading back to a time when websites had to be built multiple times. You know, mobile.example.com and so on. There are only so many ways you can media query, hide, source order tweak, and CSS tweak a design to fit in smaller and smaller spaces.

example.com
mobile.example.com
watch.example.com
virtual.example.com
voice.example.com ?

Who knows.

Most of the techniques for expanding them are a bit fancy and bound to fail in certain environments, so I’m wary of that sort of thing. And many users still have no idea about menu icons like the hamburger. (I was trying to help a client navigate Google Apps yesterday, and she found the notion of clicking on their version of the hamburger (a 9-pointed grid) totally baffling and confusing. At first she refused to click on it, because she couldn’t believe it was a link of any kind. :frowning: )

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Before I share my thoughts about the video (which I only watched for five minutes), I’m honestly baffled at some of the earlier posts regarding smart phones and the “helplessness” of millennials, being a smart phone user and a millennial myself… I mean, seriously? :dizzy_face:

I am one and I take offense. Please don’t generalize us millennials all because of a single encounter. It’s like saying all women are heart breakers because one broke your heart.


Anyway, Google loves mobile-friendly websites, which are incidentally employing RWD because of its awesomeness. Here’s an article about the Mobilegeddon last April that clearly sums up mobile responsiveness and SERPs.

Not everybody can bring their computer around, Mikey, which is why smartphones are convenient - they are a computer on the palm of your hand after all.

And as for viewing miniature versions of content, there’s always the zoom feature by the way.

I disagree. Css is more than capable of handling things like layout on smaller screens, and it is still improving.
I’m no css wizard, more of an armature, but I can make a site that shrinks down to the size of the smallest iWatch without breaking, using only html and css.
Where you could be right, is if more sites start to adopt mobile specific features and content as described in the video. Even then, it would not require a whole other site, maybe just some additional pages, or scripted conditions.

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I guess I would disagree right back.
All you can do in CSS is make things invisible and change size/positions and so on. My point would be, I suppose, if you take a webpage which is perhaps 350k of content and use CSS alone to jam it all in an iwatch, you are still left with having to hide large chunks of data, and still require 350k of space right?

I can’t see how you can take optimized content for a large screen, and just CSSifiy it to a 1.5" circle screen. There is a point at which your entire design philosophy has to change for the medium I would think. Especially if your content is heavily based on a multi-column layout which is hard to merge into single column no matter how you slice it.

AFAIK depending on what you mean by “CSSiffy” you can’t. eg.
nav menus get replaced with a “hamburger”
larger sized images get replaced with smaller images
desktop “frills” are removed altogether.

float: none; || flex-direction: column; != 'hard' ;

And how often do you do RWD? Curious.

Often enough to be constantly annoyed at it and wish I could just design an alternate site instead of trying to “make it work” at different sizes.

Obviously, designing mobile-first can help, as it can be easier to scale up than to scale down. I’m not really talking about your average modern website which is normally just a monolithic single column “tower” page. But rather, try taking a magazine or newspaper site, or other content heavy sites that depend a lot on searches, filters, tags, categories, and shrink them to flip phone sizes.

In my brain, I just think think you have to ruin the experience a little. You either have mobile-first design which creates a great experience on mobile, than scale it up for desktops where you end up with a non-optimized experience that can feel unnatural. Or you design an awesome desktop experience and end up with a crammed, less than stellar mobile experience.

For example, it always obvious when a desktop experience is crammed into mobile. They don’t remove frustrating popups and modal windows that are impossible to close. Fonts aren’t right. Giant social share bars still follow you up and down the screen, too many graphics, animations, and ads which may have been acceptable on a large screen, feel like they take 80% of the space on mobile.
The opposite is sometimes true too. A great mobile site is upscaled to desktop where the experience seems awkward, typography is not optimized, the size, scale, ratio of screen elements is unnatural, too many things hidden that don’t need to be, etc etc.

All that to say this. You get a better mobile experience when you design for mobile. And you get a better desktop experience when you design for desktop. You can certainly do both, if you want to spend the money on designers and programmers. Or you can create alternate, fully optimized sites, for each.

And remember this is not just CSS here. I know with media queries you can re-style just about everything, which is great. But there comes a time when your actual HTML may need rearranged too. This isn’t only about source order, but certain elements may need to be moved to be in completely different contexts and containers.

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This is exactly what I mean. Creates an ugly, unoptimized hack of a mobile experience. Just grab all sidebars and columns and shove them into a vertical column of 100% width. A lot more thought needs to be put in to this type of thing. If you have a list of links in a UL, everything changes, do you create a menu, a dropdown, a hamburger? Does vertical UL need to change to inline? Everything gets restyled, everything changes. It’s not just shoving multiples columns into one. This is probably what some people do, and creates the exact ugly mobile experience I’m talking about.

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Yeah, and considering JS is around 98% turned on (or closer to 99%), what my work is doing is simply moving stuff around via JS. AppendTo, InsertAfter, etc etc etc.

Oh joy. Does that mean I can look forward to even more sites with busted layouts when JS is disabled?

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