Mobile Optimization

What are we doing for mobile?

More importantly, what are we doing about mobile device optimization?

Yes, we understand that mobile is a big deal, and much of your viewership will come through mobile. 

In this post we're going to cover the functionality and the basic approach we took.

First, a little terminology. Many of you know and have heard about “responsive design”. The issue with the term is that it’s an umbrella over a whole lot of ground. The biggest categories under responsive design are width (and layout) optimization and behavior optimization.

It’s important to break those out because there is a big difference between width optimization and behavior adaptation.

In most examples of responsive design, the developer concerns himself with width optimization. In some cases, he goes farther and actually changes the behavior of the objects. Because of this grey area, I think it’s important to separate width and behavior.

Width is about layout and the objects fitting within a space (over simplification). Behavior is about actually changing the functionality of a widget (in the case of Empowerkit, an app) to make it work better for a particular device. Sometimes omitting things as well. The classic case here would be an iPad versus an iPhone.

So which are we doing? We’re doing both. The issue is that when you do both, you have something that is actually new (it has new behavior and a new layout) so you need a way to carry out stylistic decisions as well that you made on the desktop browser version of the website. We’ve done that too.

The way our optimization will work is that we will wrap your current content with new behavior that is optimized for the device that the website is being viewed on. We will also make sure all the content fits within the display, and the layout is optimal for the width as well. Lastly, we’ll pass on your color palette to make sure that we keep the design consistency.

The technology that we’re using to do this is very new, and built by Empowerkit. We really believe that you either fully adapt for the device, or you should just give the user the normal page (as desktop browsers would see it).

For further questions or comments, please get in touch.