With the rise of the Smartphone and other portable devices the issue of how a website translates to the small screen has become an increasing big deal. Designers often build beautiful websites that look amazing on a desktop that are barely navigable on the small screen of a smartphone. To get around the problem of scalability designers are often asked to build stripped down versions of a website for mobile devices which is tantamount to building a completely new website, often priced accordingly. There are also elements that designers use on websites which are not supported at all on mobile sites, such as Flash Banners and slideshows that need to be replaced when designing for mobile.
There are now new ways to design websites that make the need for a separate mobile site almost nonexistent. The old process of development using CSS and HTML required a developer to define strictly sizes tables in CSS to dictate the size of HTML elements, meaning that a web browser would display content at the exact size defined by designer. This old method was fine except that content was formed in rigidly size boxes that when loaded on smaller devices may have been hard to read or even cut off the side of the screen. The new methods of designing websites using HTML5 and CSS3 enabled a designer to create content that can be shifted and re sized responsively to the screen size of the user.
Using HTML5 and CSS3 a developer can write out instructions on how content should be displayed on a wide range of devices and screen sizes. A designer even has control of whether the website is being viewed in a landscape perspective as compared to a portrait perspective. The ability to make content modular makes it future proof, when the next latest and greatest mobile device comes out you know your content will still be able to adapt accordingly. In order to get a visual representation of what this means trying resizing this windows or viewing this site on a mobile device. you will notice all the same content and features are available be repositioned to be easily read.
There are a lot of new features and valuable tools in HTML5 that I look forward to exploring and writing about in the coming weeks.
