Web Design Has Changed Forever

In 2012 so many new devices hit the market that your web readership could be using just about anything from 3 inches to 27 inches to read your website.

First, we don't design pages anymore. Pages in books and pages in sites are quickly slipping away. Think about an ePub, the book you buy to read on your tablet or phone, the pages change with the size of type and angle of tablet (vertical or horizontal). The last epub I produced, I had to explain to my client that we just don't worry about those things called pages anymore. The dimensions are flexible. The text just flows.

On websites the dimensions must be flexible. The "page" of the past had a fixed width and shape. But our viewing options have changed completely in the last year. With 40 some devices newly invented in 2012, ranging from 3 inches to 27 inches, all with the capacity to show us a website, there is no such thing as page size anymore.

We design sites now, but really we design content. Content comes in chunks. For example, the blog is really a list of content chunks. The content chunks flow in order, often by date produced. On the opening landing "page" you see a list of the content items. Then you select one and read that article.

We think of seeing that article on a website on a desktop, but it may be on a tablet, a laptop, a tabtop, a phone or a phablet. And they are all different sizes. Did you realize that we now have tabtops and phablets? What else would you call an 8in phone that looks like a tablet?

When you figure out who your readers are and what device they may be most likely to use, we can provide for their reading enjoyment in the right size and shape. But actually, we don't get to decide what our readers will use to see our website. They do. So at this point in time, we must provide for it all.

Called "responsive" design, the new web design must respond to the dimensions of any device on the market and still look great!

Remember — website not webpage.