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Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design

Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design
Introduction We're going to walk through how to create an adaptive web experience that's designed mobile-first. This article and demo will go over the following: There is even more up to date responsive guidance on our new Web Fundamentals site. Why we need to create mobile-first, responsive, adaptive experiences How to structure HTML for an adaptive site in order to optimize performance and prioritize flexibility How to write CSS that defines shared styles first, builds up styles for larger screens with media queries, and uses relative units How to write unobtrusive Javascript to conditionally load in content fragments, take advantage of touch events and geolocation What we could do to further enhance our adaptive experience The Need for Adaptivity As the web landscape becomes increasingly complex, it's becoming extremely important to deliver solid web experiences to a growing number of contexts. However, mobile context is much more than just screen size. View the demo Structure Style Less JS

http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/responsivedesign/

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The Complete Flat Website Design Guide Flat website design is steadily becoming popular replacing the commonly known intricate designs that are dominated by drop shadows, gradients and brushes. Flat websites is the new trend with a rising design style that incorporates flat shapes and icons. A flat design basically revolves around the use of triangles, circles, rectangles and other shapes without the need to use other design elements like gradients, strokes or shadows as seen on Microsoft’s most-recent computer operating system Windows 8. A flat design is specifically based on two principles- readability and simplicity which guide designers in coming up with flat yet stylish software designs, web layouts, posters and other key applications. Simplicity Flat design refrains from the use of intricacies with the absence of drop shadows, strokes and other design elements.

Responsive Menu Concepts The following is a guest post by Tim Pietrusky. I know Tim from his prolific work on CodePen and from being a helpful community member there. He wrote to me with this guest post about responsive menus which I'm more than happy to share with you below. Not only is it a timely concept, but one of the concepts improves upon a clever CSS trick we've covered here in the past.

The 5 Best Front-End Developer Tools - The Mention Blog This is a tech post by Arnaud Breton, full-stack developer here at mention with a specific focus on the front-end side and user experience. Before joining mention, Arnaud was co-founder and CTO of UniShared and VideoNot.es, part of the Imagine K-12 2013 Winter batch. Over the last few years, we’ve seen tremendous growth in an entirely new generation of web applications. These apps have become much richer, leading to a huge increase in complexity on the front-end side. Frameworks like Backbone (the one we use at mention), AngularJS, and EmberJS provide robust solutions to build amazing apps, leveraging all of the web’s power.

The Ultimate Guide - How To Start a Blog That Makes Money In the 1990′s people started creating online diaries. They were given the title of “web logs”. Popular myth has it that it became “we blog” and the “we” got dropped for the sake of language expediency. The word “blog” then emerged from the mist of vernacular evolution.

A Three Step Guide to Usability on the Mobile Web Designing mobile sites is a different kind of web design. Much like your first experience of designing for the desktop web, it can be both exhilarating and daunting in equal measures. So many possibilities, yet so many usability restrictions. Don't panic, we've been there too. The Startup Guide - Creating a Better World Through Entrepreneurship A startup has to act quickly, yet not to run out of money as it grows. Here’s how to chart a rapid course for growth… By Ryan Allis, CEO of Connect When you hear the term business plan, you might visualize a 40 page document, full of dense paragraphs, charts, and diagrams. Today, in fact, most business plans are not such in-depth documents. Business plans today often to come in the form of slide decks or shorter 10 page executive summaries.

What Your Website Needs for 2015 The best way to guarantee a prosperous new year is an up-to-date company website. This article describes a few of the most important features your site needs going into 2015. Responsive Website Design Responsive design allows your website to automatically adjust for optimal viewing on desktops, tablets and smartphones. With so many people using mobile devices for Internet access, responsive design has quickly moved from a luxury item to a must-have feature. All about the design – top tips for designing mobile sites and apps from the professionals As mobile devices become increasingly capable and the mobile audience becomes increasingly sophisticated, companies are stretching the bounds of possibility when it comes to mobile sites, native applications and Web apps. It becomes all the more important to consider not just graphical design, but also the physical design of your mobile product. It is essential to know not only who will be using it, but how and where they will be using it. This is the fifth in our series of six app-related articles. See also:• Mobile applications: native v Web apps – what are the pros and cons?

How we make RWD sites load fast as heck Posted by Scott on 07/30/2014 There has been a lot of discussion about optimizing responsive layouts for performance lately, and I think that’s great. Speed broadens access and makes users happy, much like responsive design. In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time researching page loading performance, both for our ongoing client work here at FG and for my book Responsible Responsive Design. In the process, I’ve reaffirmed my belief that we don’t need to compromise the well-known benefits of a responsive layout in order to make our sites load as fast as heck. In this post, I’ll outline some recent observations and approaches to delivering sites for speed and broader access, and link out to various tools we are using to facilitate our approach.

A Responsive Web Design Tutorial for Beginners This is the second post in a series about Responsive Web Design, described in plain language from a front end designer. In our last post I wrote about three reasons responsive web design is something you should know about. We discussed the problems associated with the traditional method of designing a desktop and mobile version of a website. Essentially, there are just too many mobile devices hitting the market to tailor our websites to view well on them all. About rich snippets and structured data - Webmaster Tools Help Rich snippets (microdata, microformats, RDFa, and Data Highlighter) Snippets—the few lines of text that appear under every search result—are designed to give users a sense for what’s on the page and why it’s relevant to their query. If Google understands the content on your pages, we can create rich snippets—detailed information intended to help users with specific queries. For example, the snippet for a restaurant might show the average review and price range; the snippet for a recipe page might show the total preparation time, a photo, and the recipe’s review rating; and the snippet for a music album could list songs along with a link to play each song. These rich snippets help users recognize when your site is relevant to their search, and may result in more clicks to your pages. Three steps to rich snippets:

20 Best Responsive Web Design Examples of 2012 The Boston Globe The largest responsive website to date, The Boston Globe handles loads of content effortlessly, keeping the site intuitive and the content easily accessible on the device of your choice. Smashing Magazine I love this site. I really do. Smashing takes advantage of horizontal screen real estate like few responsive sites do.

How to Test Responsive Designs By Jacob Gube Testing your responsive web designs is crucial because the user experience on mobile devices is quite different from desktops. But actual testing on all the mobile devices in the market isn’t practical for most of us. So a simple responsive design testing technique some of us do is resizing our browser’s window size to kind of match the viewport sizes of smartphones and tablets. This is a quick-and-dirty trick for basic visual testing and it help us spot major problems, but it’s a terribly inaccurate portrayal of the mobile device experience.

How to Approach a Responsive Design - Upstatement Blog So I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before. This shouldn’t come as some huge shock. I mean, raise your hand if you’d built a full responsive site back in November 2010. (You can put your hand down now, Mr.

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