Skip Navigation
Falvey Library
Advanced
You are exploring: Home > Blogs

Falvey Library – now responsive in more ways than one

If you follow Villanova’s Digital Library on Twitter, you may have seen this recent tweet:

Check out our new responsive design (thanks to @crhallberg!): http://t.co/VmWL30gonx Play around & let us know what you think! #webdesign

— VillanovaDigitalLib (@VillanovaDigLib) December 5, 2013

Proud to say that the shout-out refers to me, Chris Hallberg, and I’m going into my third year of working on the front end of the Digital Library. That probably doesn’t mean much to you though, so let’s cut to the chase.

“Responsive”?

CHRIS HALLBERGaka: what is Chris’ job?

That’s a fancy way of saying that Falvey’s website has been designed to adapt to any size screen that it’s viewed on. This capability is an evolution from the design model of having two completely different websites: one to handle desktop users (ie. Wolfram Alpha) and another for mobile users (Wolfram Alpha again, mobile edition). Managing parallel websites presents two major problems: developers have to design, build, test, deploy, host and update two separate sites; and some functionality is lost.

Faster browsers, faster Internet speeds and updated web technologies allow web builders to create more powerful web pages than ever before. Web users know this, and they don’t want to settle. They demand the complicated features of the “full” website on their phones, and more and more users and mobile browsers try to use their ever increasing phone sizes to look at the desktop version. If you’ve ever tried this, you’ll know a lot of full websites look terrible on phones. This is where responsive design saves the day.

Read the rest of Chris’ informative primer on responsive web design from the Digital Library’s Blue Electrode here :


Like
1 People Like This Post

0 Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

 


Last Modified: December 12, 2013

Ask Us: Live Chat
Back to Top