1001 reasons why xara need to include rwd features in their web design apps
http://designinstruct.com/roundups/i...ve-web-design/
by not doing so they are saying rwd isn't important guys don't worry
well it is and you should
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1001 reasons why xara need to include rwd features in their web design apps
http://designinstruct.com/roundups/i...ve-web-design/
by not doing so they are saying rwd isn't important guys don't worry
well it is and you should
Just how important is it when their site isn't responsive?
But, I agree for the most part.
It's come up a number of times in the recent past.
Thing is, Xara is a WYSIWYG web designing app, Responsive Design isn't WYSIWYG. Charles Moir is big on 100% WYSIWYG.
The question is whether the Xara camleot core is capable of this without a complete from the ground up rewrite, which would require a large investment in development costs.
Certainly the the HTMLfilter.dll would almost certainly need a major rewrite.
even if it can't automate it which i agree would be a monumental task the web design apps could provide maybe a sidebar design column where a user can design hhis mobile page/s alongside his desktop bound page/s
that in itself would add a lvl of unwanted screen clutter what with all the galleries but i notice from many posts a lot of people have monster screens and i have a couple of 1920 monitros
i'm woefully behind on making m own sites mobile ready
mostly because im lazy and i"m happy with the display of my sites on my own phone (an old samsung wave)
but they're not responsive and they rely on the user zooming
i've made resolution to add heath robinson-type rwd to my xara sites from now on
because i'm a fool if i think my clients will not listen to my competition who do offer it
its not rocket science to knock something up and the more you do the more you get into the habit
if it satisfies the needs of modern browsing and my clients then im all for it
especially if i can add a bit onto the bill as well for that phrase 'mobile ready"
well like me they just move on to another site
i dont mobile browse a lot and in fact i hate m.google preferring to use google
but if in a hurry for information mible sites work for me better than big ones
and i suppose mobile sites are by definition for the user who's in a hurry
im stuck behind a desk and a big screen most of the time so its easy to forget more and more people use their phones
but im not really sure how to deal with the tablet brigade
do a site for them too? really really not sure
I know that probably that logic would drop out some of the screens, but on tablets what can be some average width of resolution?
As Frank mentions I neither like any mobile version of sites like the google has or the facebook too, not long ago searched how to go to the original facebook page from a tablet. But this just shows that a lot of users prefer one site in one format, that would maybe give some argument to search a minimum resolution which works on phones, tablets, and monitors, risking of course that on mobile devices the full screen is filled and on monitors only some of that
I think it's becoming less of a problem as time goes on. As tablet resolutions go up more and more sites suddenly fit. You could of course design everything to fit 768px wide and you're going to keep a lot of people happy. It's also second nature to just turn the tablet around to landscape if it doesn't fit in portrait, and then most things fit.
As for mobile phones, I rarely look at sites on them. Once you're over 50 I think one just says stuff it. I'll wait until later and view it on something where I don't have to squint.
a lot depends on
- the target market of the site
- how much you want to stripe the client for having a mobile version
If you need a mobile version then design a mobile version. It does not make sense to sacrifice what you would normally have in a browser version and it is overkill to expect someone with a mobile connection to wait to download your browser version. Create a mobile and a browser version. Sledger has a good script somewhere to redirect your visitors to the mobile site if they come in with a smart phone. And if you design your site judiciously it will look good and be functional on a tablet.
so let it be said
let's all shave his head
Frank,
I think the jury's still out on this one. I really wasn't paying attention to RWD until the post on the market trends. I think there's a valid point there.
However, I'm not sure all sites would convert well. For example, I while back I did a makeover of a very image heavy site from a fluid layout (this was way before RWD) to a fixed width layout. This was a site for high end custom built furniture. Not only was the new site visually more appealing, it was easier to navigate and didn't change how many images were displayed (width-wise) as the browser was re-sized. I find that on very large monitors, too many columns is more confusing than just a few with more rows that are scrolled. The site owner agreed and was happy with the result. It displays fine on a tablet, at least one the size of an iPad3. And, I'm not sure how likely someone looking for pricey, high end custom furniture is to be using a smart phone to find what they want.
So, I think the answer may be, it depends... on the nature of the content and the target audience. For less image intensive applications, I think the responsive web design may have real value, especially where it is more likely to be viewed on a smartphone or iPod size device.
Yes that is a solution, but as a customer, that directs me rather away from that format of the site. The mobile version used to be typically restricted in some functions or just simply strangely/newly look, like the default facebook on the tablet. My first reaction was immediately to wishing that one, which to accustomed on the PC. But of course everybody is different
HI sledger, would you mind share your script for redirecting mobile thks in advance
Jacques
Agreed. This is a marketing decision, not a technical or design decision. At last survey, 40%+ of all internet access was mobile (phone, tablet.) If you want that market then you use the program or design the site to make that easy for your customers. If your site is for family pictures, then you can ignore alternate formats.
As to Xara being a WYSIWYG, that is the developer's choice. But, if the company begins to lose sales because its customers seek RWD features, then maybe it will be worth a rewrite. I don't think that is the case with Xara. Those companies just wanting a web presence have too many cookie-cutter options to be bothered with learning a software. Xara is perfect for the small to mid-sized company with a one or two person marketing staff responsible for a web and print presence. I have used it since 94 for that very reason. Draw once and use everywhere. IMHO.
Responsive Web Design for Xara users is probably one of those things people wish for but would hate as soon as their wish came true.
That was a fine attitude until about a year ago. With RWD becoming more mainstream, it's getting less common/popular to do the separate mobile site.Quote:
If you need a mobile version then design a mobile version.
We generate mostly Joomla! sites these days and all the newest ones we've done are responsive. The same content can be delivered to the right size and automatically flow its info. To create an individual "small screen" site would be nice if there weren't 10 different sizes out there, plus the portrait vs. landscape versions of those. It's just not practical to design that many possibilities to make sure your site is appropriate for all browser sizes.
In Responsive, the content of the site can stay the same, and the back end determines what parts should be loaded (or not) according to the size, so you can really specify at a pretty granular level whether to include that big background image, whether a slider component (or whatever) should show at a small size, etc.
I don't anticipate Xara sites to go the responsive way just because of the nature of the way they are created and output - there wouldn't be an easy way I can think of to design something without the "code" aspect to automatically know how to deal with itself, unless it were done with something like wierd uses of the Name of objects or something.
Just a few thoughts.
Designing a separate mobile site in Xara is a good solution if you don't wish to become one with HTML/CSS or take up template customisation.
It's a misconception to imagine that people are building one site when they use responsive techniques, they are building a site that changes according to various criteria - often screen size, so you still have to design for multiple screen sizes, it's just that it's done in the same code.
It would be interesting to hear from all the people clamouring for Xara to be a responsive web designer, to explain how they could do that. Just how would that work?
Responsive web design isn't WYSIWYG design, so it's a real challenge for Xara.
Jimi said As for mobile phones, I rarely look at sites on them. Once you're over 50 I think one just says stuff it. I'll wait until later and view it on something where I don't have to squint.
Jimi made a great point - any site that requires squinting, sure as heck wasn't designed for the platform it's being viewed upon and would benefit from a design that suits the platform form factor, whether that's a responsive design or a separate mobile site.
ok here's a very very rough and unpolished thought
you select "web document" and you get a dialog that says "do you want to do a mobile at site at the same time"
if you say yes you get two pages side by side, one for desktop size, one for the current "average" mobile width (not an easy choice but let's say there is one)
you design your desktop side and you drag and drop your essential mobile elements from the desktop to the mobile side
every new page created follows the same convention as above
when you're finished the preview gives you two views side by side
then when you export it automatically creates a js or php or htaccess solution to do a mobile detect with maybe a cookie to prevent looping
and the export puts the mobile in a subdirectory or a subdomain as required
its not perfect by any means
but it's a start and gets people thinking about accessibility for mobile devices
the mobile web market is exploding
those of us in web design are feeling the pressure
every single client this year has in one way or another asked me about this
having a solution to hand is better than not having one at all
those movie makers who said talkies would never take off lost everything
i do my best to design for end users but when it comes down to it i'm designing for the people who pay the bills
BF your idea is a good one, I think.
It's not responsive, but a way of making it easier for people to create multiple sites for different resolutions but keep the designs together.
I have a feeling I've seen a similar thing with some existing software, but can't remember where.
It's a mystery to me that Xara hasn't included a mobile switch feature already.
Paul, you may have seen it in Adobe Muse, that has a very similar capability, you tell the software that you also want a mobile site it create the pages optimised for the mobile. It creates the master pages and converts backgrounds etc and you then decide which elements you want to keep and it resizes them appropriately and when publishing it publishes both sites and sets up the code.
since i stopped wondering what adobe was up to a long time ago maybe my very very rough and unpolished thought isn't so very very rough and unpolished after all :D
Sounds like a good approach having the pages side by side and have it export a screen size detection script automatically. You could possibly go a step further and have 3 or more pages side by side for various common screen sizes. Certainly seems like it would be much easier to implement than responsive design and it wouldn't jepordise how wysiwyg works at the moment as much as responsive design would. Although a mobile site doesn't nesecarrily have to have the same pages as a desktop site, so you might have a scenario where you have some pages dedicated to one or the other but not both, I guess you could ignore and leave them blank or put a page not found message on them that links to the mobile home page or desktop view. The biggest thing would probably be the page and layer gallery which would need to be able to support these new page types because sharing layers accross the desktop and mobile pages wouldn't work.
as always the biggest threat to such an evolution is screen clutter but the animation and frame gallery, the presentation toolbar are unavailable unless you're doing a animation/presentation and this could use the same convention, disabling certain screen elements, but what would be nice when you're doing this would be synchronised scrolling, synchronised selection of elements, with the ability ofc to disable
If you design for a mobile phone or tablet, your placement and content can be radically different, so synchronisation would work against this.
You may not even have some desktop elements on a mobile version.
The "programming" (really mostly css rules) that makes the site responsive (assuming that you are using a natively responsive layout to begin with, such as Twitter Bootstrap or in the case of Joomla 3.x, that framework is built in - we use a framework on top of that structure called T3, which has a lot of the basic scaffolding done) is usually done with "overrides".
Once we design the desktop version, we then have options to determine at which of 5 resolution ranges each of the "modules" will appear on. This happens via the administrative backend of the site "template" (we use the "blank" one and build according to the design created in Xara DPX9). So I can specify for "wide", "normal", "xtablet", "tablet", and "mobile". I can also determine what resolution ranges apply to each of those, though the defaults are pretty accurate currently. Then, the main layout and css of the primary site cascade down to the responsive sizes so the primary elements are properly styled already. Then you override those styles according to needs. For example, I wold typically have left justified test on the left wide of the footer and right justified on the right side, and in desktop mode, this makes sense, but when you get down to mobile size, the module on the right side of the footer drops BELOW the one on the left side, so it looks odd on a mobile device. To override this, I create a rule at the mobile css file that specifies that the text in that module needs to be left justified instead. Then that is taken care of and otherwise automatically looks correct.
So - as you can see from that complexity, it really would be pretty hard to do in Xara as a Website creator directly, since it's not really 5 different designs, it's just rules to tell the main design how to behave. You COULD go extreme with this and have a completely different set of modules appear (using the unified content) at the mobile device level to hone in on just a few necessary parts - still better than a specifically mobile site because the content still comes from the same place, as do the other rules if needed.
We use Xara DPX9 to mock up the site, create and slice up the graphics, show previews to our clients with website export, etc and then code a custom Joomla! template to follow that design and act responsively.
Even Google is now saying "use a responsive site" to alleviate issues with duplicate content and deep-link to home page redirection - which they have stated will now actually penalize ecommerce sites.
It IS a lot of extra work, but a good selling point, but our typical customer who wants a "Xara site", which we will do in a budget case or for someone who doesn't care to update it themselves - ever, and has no need for a Blog (page size issues in Xara sites)...but we find that most of them, once hearing the explanation of the differences, opt for a few more bucks to do a Content Management System instead.
I hope this adds to the conversation without seeming argumentative - or stepping outside of the point of the web aspects of Xara.
Here is my post from the Web Gallery forum with my own two cents worth on this very subject, of Responsive Web Design:
I have designed a website for a local restaurant and the customer was very happy with it. But, as a side remark, they mentioned it did not "fit" on their smartphone screens and indicated that they actually expected their website to fit as a matter-of-fact. As frequently discussed on these two WD forums, customers are now expecting their websites to be 'responsive' (even if they do not know what that means). So, because I am thick and not able (willing) to learn responsive web design, my best option is to use Xara to knock up a mini version of a website. Because Xara is so easy and quick, I can quickly cut and paste the main elements or contents of the main site and fit them into a smaller page size and only use the most pertinent information so that the phone versions loads as quickly as possible.
My customer is very pleased with his new mobile-optimised site but I still have just the one problem, and that is I still cannot 'lock' the website in the side-to-side position. This only occurs on the iPhone, Android versions of this website are 'locked' into position and look better on the screen. If I could fix this lock problem, I think I could legitimately say that Xara can now cover both bases, even if it isn't a genuine 'responsive site, it is a sellable option for us Xara designers. If anyone has any ideas, I am pretty sure if a fix can be found, it would answer a lot of the mobile-optimised site questions we keep getting on this forum.
I have tested the redirect and it sends most phones correctly to the mobile site, unless someone here tells me that their particular phone is not redirected (maybe a Windows phone?).
Please let me know what you think here> http://mojitosmexicangrill.com
Works fine on my Samsung phone.