2012-10-11 12:57, Tim W wrote:
> Obviously any new website I make I need to think about how it will
> display on a phone and a tablet.
Or on any other device.
> I need to make the width of the design variable down to about 620 pxs,
No, you don't need to do that. There's fluid design that adapts to any
width. But it does not apply to all situations. Without any idea of your
overall design and content, it is impossible to recommend a specific
approach.
> 640 being the width of an iphone screen and there isn't any reason to
> think that screen pixel sizes are going to get even smaller again.
There are loads of reasons to know that rendering area widths can be
much smaller. Just think about using a normal desktop computer with a
dozen windows open on the screen.
> Keeping a careful eye on how my layout is constructed with floats,
> positioning, tables and lists I want to make sure that it remains
> readable and coherent, with elements falling below one another as
> necessary as the width is reduced.
"Floats" sounds ominous. It is difficult to get robust layout with floats.
But if the current design works, say, in a rendering area that is at
least 1024 pixels wide, you could simply decide a different layout for
areas narrower than that, implement it with a style sheet, and just use
@media rules to select between the two styles. Or you could soup up
several alternate styles, but two is certainly much more than one, when
done properly.
> Then I need to make sure that text sizes can be raised a bit to
> compensate for the high resolution of a phone screen without
>
> making
> the text
> into a
> sort of
> cummings
> type
> poem
> like
> this
I suppose you mean *decreasing* text sizes. "Phone" browsers use rather
small sizes by default, though this depends on settings and some fancy
tags. The point however is that there is not much room for columns on
the screens. Two columns might work, and people just might turn to
landscape position if there are three columns, but then the vertical
space gets rather limited.
> is that all there is to it, this 'responsive' design lark?
Surely not. You haven't really got started yet. A good starting point is
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/r...ve-web-design/
--
Yucca,
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/