Responsive web design is a design approach that strives to provide the best browsing experience regardless of device or screen size. As regular readers of this blog will know it’s been making huge gains in popularity. Continue reading
The growing popularity of responsive web design
Since Andrew Grimes first posted about responsive web design on this blog in February, interest has grown rapidly. The chart below, shared by elearning company Kineo, shows Google searches for responsive design outstripping those for mobile web design over the last few years. Continue reading
The mobile internet takeover: are we there yet?
For a while now we’ve had a chart in our presentation decks about the point at which mobile access to the internet passes desktop. But has this point already been reached?
Back in 2010, Morgan Stanley’s prediction was that ‘Mobile Will Be Bigger Than Desktop Internet in 5 Years’. At about the same time, Gartner forecast that: ‘Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access devices worldwide by 2013.
With two quarters of 2012 behind us, it’s worth looking at how those predictions are shaping up, and by one measure at least it looks as if even Gartner’s more aggressive forecast may already have been proven too conservative.
According to figures from IDC (quoted on the SmartOnline blog) smartphones outsold PCs for the first time in Quarter Four 2010, an inflection point predicted not to happen by Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker until 2012.
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Source: Morgan Stanley
Should we adopt ‘responsive design’?
Delivering consistency across all touch-points is the mantra of anyone seeking to create a brand experience worth its salt. Of course, in the last year or two we’ve seen an explosion in the number of internet enabled devices. Mobile is predicted to replace the desktop as the most common web browsing device by next year. Continue reading Social media: dangers in the backchannel?
Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with social media will know that using it as a backchannel is not an option you switch on or off. It is, inherently, at least 50% backchannel. Social media’s most salient characteristic, in fact, is its interactivity. So much so that one has trouble disentangling message ‘push’ from what you almost immediately get back. Post to a LinkedIn group, say, and people reply. And they expect a reply in return. You might have been trying to do a bit of PR, but what you get drawn into is a conversation.
This diminution of lag between messaging and response – coupled with the transparency of that response to the whole community (be it positive or negative) is what makes social media so hard to fit into traditional models of business communications.
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