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The future of web design

December 19, 2011 | Hotel Marketing

The future of web design is about moving beyond designing for one device. Is it all about mobile? No. But mobile is incredibly important. The web is not a fixed width and a website needs to respond and adapt to these different platforms in a fluid and effective way.

In the past, when a user accessed a website, its servers pushed content to them based on what platform they were using- mobile, tablet or desktop web. But over the past year, engineers have begun to adopt responsive web design, which includes fluid widths, scalable images and adjustable layouts that remain consistent across all platforms, whether you’re accessing the site on a mobile phone, tablet, desktop computer or wide-screen.

It’s not just about resizing a site to fit on the iPhone. There are dozens of details that designers have to pay attention to across the board. For example, when Apple upgraded the resolution on the iPhone 4 last year, web designers had to update all their images so the user would have the same brilliant experience across all platforms.

Responsive web design not only creates a better user experience, it’s also economical. Companies only need to maintain one code base, which costs much less– and they don’t have to worry about version control. For example, if you have two sites, one for mobile and one for desktop, you carry the extra burden of syncing those builds.

Get the full story at The Next Web

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