Episode 23: Responsive Website Design Brisbane

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[00:00:00]  Saul: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Web Design Podcast This is episode number 23 and today's episode is entitled Responsive Website Design Brisbane. My name is Saul Edmonds, and as usual, I'm joined by the lovely Gillian Smith.

[00:00:13]  Gillian: Good morning Saul! How are you doing today?

[00:00:15]  Saul:  I'm great. How are you? 

[00:00:16]  Gillian:  I'm fine.  

[00:00:17] Saul: Fantastic. We are the co-founders and creative directors of Roundhouse, the creative agency, a local business with a passion for helping our clients grow. Over to you, Gil. 

[00:00:26]  Gillian: Okay, thanks, Saul.  Well, today we'll ask the question, what are the benefits of responsive website design for small business? Our goal is to help small business owners’ start-ups and entrepreneurs in the city of Brisbane, Australia, take their opportunities to the next level with brilliant website design. If you're from another location or city. Welcome. Thanks for joining us today. And we hope we can help you grow your business in the online space.

[00:00:52]  Saul: What's today's topics, Gil? 

[00:00:54]  Saul: Well, today. We're focusing on responsive website design. Okay, so what is it that makes web site responsive? What's the difference between a responsive website and a mobile one? What are some of the benefits of responsive website for small business? So we've got lots to get through today. So let's get started. Okay, so from your many years of experience, can you give us a summary of what is responsive website design? 

[00:01:20]  Saul: Okay, responsive website design is key. The key to that is the word responsive, in that websites used to be many years ago just fixed this in their size. Like, if you were looking at something in print, it has a fixed size, it doesn't actually change. That's how websites used to be because they were only viewed on a certain size screen most of the time so there was no real need to really to change them but that need for having a responsive website layout was driven by the ROI in what and what's now normal of smartphones and tablets and lots of different sized screens, small, large, super large. So having a website layout that is able to change, and reorder, where things are actually laid out on the page it to make them more narrow or to sit underneath each other is now important, because you have to have a good experience across all devices. 

[00:02:29]  Gillian: When it comes to website design, how difficult is it to resolve a website design when it has to be used across so many devices?  

[00:02:38]  Saul:  So  it's not really that hard, there's just a simple, a few different elements that you have to keep in mind is there's a point of which you go from a larger screen or so considered to be the normal experience. If you have like a starting point that's on a desktop computer, or large certain size laptops like a 15 inch screen, hypothetically, anything bigger, the screen looks a certain way, anything, anything smaller than that once you get to a certain point, a certain size screen, that's the trigger to change that over to have a slightly modified look, and so forth, and you can set those triggers to be wherever they need to be but there's standard ones that really apply to certain devices. Then you just have to make sense of ordering your content in terms of  blocks of content so that easily able to be reordered and still make sense and looks good.

[00:03:45]  Gillian: Now, is a responsive website the same thing as a mobile website? 

[00:03:50]  Saul: No, it definitely isn't. A mobile website is more like what I guess most people consider to be an app. It's a mobile specific experience. So there's generally not any scrolling, or things that you consider to be normal on the side, we all scroll a lot. It's not like we don't, we aren't used to scrolling and we use our fingers more than we ever have to do things with on screens. But a mobile website would look and feel more specifically, like the sort of experience we'd all be very used to in an app that you download from the iOS App Store from or from Google Play.

[00:04:40]  Gillian: So in terms of key tips for small business owners who are getting started on their website, and they wanted to be responsive, what are some key tips that they should include here to make sure their website delivers real value for money? 

[00:04:54]  Saul: Okay, so that's going to be really the job of the website, designer, but it is influenced by the type of content too so if you're going to have a responsive website, which all sites are anyway, generally, the general rule of thumb, not everything has to be super simple and over simplified but when you're organizing content, that is part of the reason responsive websites, and the changing nature of how websites have to be viewed, is, in my mind, anyway, that's one of the primary reasons for a change in some of the design sensibility for a lot of websites becoming a little bit more minimal and a bit more, which isn't makes sense,  which isn't necessarily a bad thing, because it makes more sense, and it's easier to have things changing and still look okay. 

[00:05:55]  Gillian: If less elements apply? 

[00:05:57]  Saul: Yeah, if you got less elements, it doesn't mean it has to be super zone and super stripped back and like, empty. I mean, sometimes that looks great anyway, but that

[00:06:08] Gillian: feel like a fit with your brand and your goals. Yeah, and your audience. 

[00:06:11]  Saul: So therefore, there's often from a design perspective, more focus on the little things on us within our design elements. 

[00:06:20] Gillian: When you design a website, do you actually test it across all those devices? To see how it actually looks and how it responds?

[00:06:27]  Saul: Yeah, that's right. You have to and you with most content management systems, they already have a responsive element built into them, meaning that they already do that. There's already certain points at which there has to change, however, then if you need to customize that further, for any reason, like it needs to look probably, it might still be responsive site. But an example might be you want your mobile version, when it responsive, but you're viewing it on your smartphone, you want that to have less content, so you can remove certain content, if you had quite a big homepage, and really the mobile experience and on mobile isn't going to be as good. It might be okay, but you want to modify that just to optimize it a bit, then you can customize that further.

[00:07:24]  Saul: Okay, so, regarding our responsive websites, and mobile versions of websites. That's it for today, guys. Thanks once again, so much for listening. We hope that you got something out of that. Before we go, please don't forget to rate review and subscribe to this podcast. We'd love to hear your feedback. Also, if you'd like to read the transcript of this episode, please visit our website at roundhouse.cc forward slash web-design. We are on a journey to help local prison businesses grab the opportunities online and exceed their goals. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you tomorrow. Bye.

[00:08:06]  Gillian: Bye, everyone.