Dentistry practice in Van Wert, Ohio gets a responsive site
We recently completed work on branding, business identity, and a website for a family dentistry practice, Jeffrey Mohr Family Dentistry, in Van Wert Ohio. We were presented with a challenge — how do we effectively communicate the best relevant information for both users with a full-width desktop browser, and one who is viewing on a mobile browser?
Our designers have been talking a lot about responsive web design, a concept we became excited about after reading A Book Apart‘s book on Responsive Web Design. On their website, they quote John Allsopp’s article, “A Dao of Web Design“:
The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”
Basically, he calls for an end to thinking of a website as an extension of a static, print brochure, and acknowledged that web traffic is trending to a higher percentage of mobile browsers. So many websites that are “optimized for mobile” are pieced together, as a stripped-down afterthought to a desktop browser-width site.
Responsive design changes that. A responsive website designs a layout for a desktop/laptop, tablet, and mobile browser alongside each other, and uses media queries to determine what type of browser is loading the site. Best yet, it’s a fluid, dynamic layout. If you resize the window in your desktop browser, it will reorder and rescale in front of your eyes. (Click the website screengrab and try for yourself! If you make the window narrower, you can see how it scales and reorders information.
If you scale the Jeffrey-Mohr website smaller, you can see how the header image, slow-loading on a browser running on 3G, switches out, and the phone number displays more prominently on the screen. And if your mobile browser is a phone, the phone number becomes clickable so you can call their office right from the website.
This is the future of web design. We’re making a commitment to make as many of our web projects as responsive as we can to give a site longevity. Right now, we’re at the forefront of this technology, and we hope that more in the industry will follow. We’ll be talking more and more about responsive design here.
Meanwhile, we’re excited to launch this site! If you ever need a dentist in the Van Wert Area, go meet Dr. Jessica Mohr. She’s friendly, gentle, and community driven. Cruise on by her and her father’s website, whether on your desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone, and check them out!
Posted December 14, 2011 at 4:24 pm by Andy Welfle