Responsive Web Design using Xara

[happyvj]

Hi,
Responsive Web Design is the need of the hour. All my clients are asking for. Going by Xara's 1 year release cycle, we can expect something about RWD only late next year. That too if RWD is on their roadmap. This timeline might be too late. An earnest request to Xara team to make an intermediate release of DP8 with support for RWD before end 2012.

VJ Anand - An ardent fan who does not want to look beyond Xara for RWD.

[gwpriester]

This came up recently. It's just a guess, but I would not expect to see this any time soon.

[happyvj]

I understand, but I thought I would still give it a try.

[RedBopete]

I'm wondering just how much Responsive Web Design is really needed. Maybe this is a case of sour grapes, since I use Xara and Xara can't make the fluid designs that make up RWD, but is this really the next big thing, or is this something that's being hyped. Is it really better to build this way, or is it just as good to develop separate web pages that are designed specifically for tablets and smart phones (and whatever else may be out there). I notice for example that some of the major news sites switch to mobile versions of their pages, which appear to use less graphics, and text links instead of nav buttons. This seems wise since dl speed may be a consideration on mobile devices. Thoughts?

[pauland]

Responsive web design is a big thing. It's about being able to tailor what the user sees to the media - which could be various devices/sizes/formats/print - without having to build a different version for each one, or needing special code to switch web addresses. Importantly this feature is part of web standards and supported by modern browsers, so HTML developers are going to use this ability to optimise their web pages.

Mobile devices really have two major differences compared to desktops - a need for lightweight pages because data can cost money or downloads are slow, and also a different usage pattern on a touch screen and small display. Mobile sites designed for phones tend to be very lightweight and hone in on the essential data rather than flamboyant graphics. A lot of things that exist on desktop sites are very clumsy on a phone - drop downs, sliders, small buttons.

So the mindset for mobile websites is different to that on desktops and it's different between phones and tablets. Even if a desktop site is viewable on a tablet, it will be a poor cousin in comparison to one designed just for a tablet (or mobile).

[Cloud]

As someone who has based a business on xara web designer (now nearing 90 websites with xara) I have had many requests over the past year, the top of the list is CMS - content management so that the client can make changes themselves, blogs and ecommerce, xara is a no no for the fist two but ecommerce with ecwid can be easily achieved to mimic and have almost the functionality of most ecommerce software. Now very, very recently we have been asked about mobile websites and with certain scripts it is a viable thing with xara but responsive sites will never happen with xara webdesigner in it's current form. We are working with wordpress to create some very nice responsive sites and will hopefully have some posted in the non-xara web section of the forum.

As far as how much responsive websites are needed? I wouldn't say that it is a necessity but let me give you some stats: half of our clients websites have over 50% of visitors from mobile browsers, some (mainly beauty/fashion sites) have over 80% of mobile browser visitors, you can expect that by the end of next year most sites will be visited mainly though mobile browsers, especially with 4G becoming widely available. There are as I see it three options, just have a desktop optimised site only (most phones can still view the sites but the user experience is ok to terrible) have a desktop AND mobile optimised site and a script to re-direct to to the mobile version or have best of all have a responsive site which can be viewed comfortably on any screen size and keep the branding and the way the site is used the same. Responsive sites are of course in their infancy but things change very quickly and I would not be surprised that all major sites will be responsive by the end of the year, microsoft will have their responsive site live very soon as will apple and the rest are sure to follow, people like sony have already done so and it works very well. As an example head over to wordpress theme seller sites and you will see that the majority of new themes/templates are responsive.

[happyvj]

The message is very clear that the touch devices (pad, mobiles and whatever else is in the making) are definitely here to stay. People would be using more of these than laptops going forward. So it becomes very crucial to present content on these devices which is intuitive and fast. And with 3g/4g technology BW speeds might not be a hindrance to this growth.
That said I understand Xara has a challenging task to make its product RWD friendly. But I feel the result would be very exciting and rewarding to say the least.