WD Features are Mobile Device Friendly v Screen Resolution Problems

[graphmap]

There have been several posts and replies on this Forum about getting the browser to display a site created with Xara’s Web Designer that looks right, irrespective of the screen resolution the viewer is using. This is mainly applicable to the increasing trend to access web pages on mobile devices - smart phones and tablets.

The advice given in an earlier post is that Web Designer cannot produce dynamically re sizing websites because it functions as WYSIWYG design and only static fixed design is possible. If the browser window is smaller than the content that it contains, you will get scrollbars. It is as simple as that.

Further advice was given in another post that if you want to have a responsive design, you can tailor different versions of the design, place these in appropriate sub-directories and then use media queries to call the appropriate version according to the viewer’s scree size.

To me, the above comments make good sense and therefore to make a truly one-only responsive site with Web Designer is not possible. The alternative is probably to adopt an entirely different design environment, say Dreamweaver.

However, on the Xara Web Designer’s Features page it states:

"Websites made with Web Designer are ready for the latest iOS and Android smartphones and tablets. We‘ve invested significant effort in making all our templates and features ready for mobile devices, so that you no longer need to spend time creating special cut down (and often ugly) mobile versions of your websites, with complicated redirects.”
To me, it seems that there is something missing (perhaps contradictive) between what is stated (above) and what the actual reality".

Am I missing something?

How can I use Web Designer to have “features ready for mobile devices, so that you no longer need to spend time creating special cut down (and often ugly) mobile versions of your websites, with complicated redirects”?

Won’t I still need to have media queries (done with JavaScript’s and CSS) to call the appropriate version according to the viewer’s scree size?

Any comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Joe Stewart

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics - By ready for mobile devices, I think they mean their is a viewport line of code that supposedly reduces the website to the size of the screen of the device upon which the site is being viewed. What I believe, however, is sites designed for a large monitor, are not ideal for a small mobile device. The buttons are too small, it can take too long for all the graphics that look great on the big screen to download, and all that. My advice is to design a smaller version, about 480 pixels wide, for mobile devices and keep your site simple, make your buttons big, so a mobile user can actually use them, make your text largish so the user can actually read it. It a little bit of extra effort but in the end it is well worth the time.