By When you first start to build a website in EverWeb, your first task, after creating your website Project is to choose the page that you want to use for its first page. You’re initially presented with EverWeb’s Theme Template Chooser. It seems simple, you just choose the design you want and off you go. There are aver two hundred boilerplate themes on which tobase your website’s design upon, so what’s the problem?
What you don’t see is that the themes presented are of two different types. You’ll only see this if you click on the filter dropdown menu in the top left hand corner of the Theme Template Chooser. Initially this is set to ‘All’ but when you click on ‘All’ you’ll see that there are four options ro choose from: All, Fixed Width, Responsive and New. So you have two choices ahead of you: Fixed Width or Responsive. What should you do? Let’s explore this so you can make the best decision for you and your site…
The Not So New Now of Web Design…
Let’s start with the state of web design today. Most, if not all of the sites that you see in your browser today will use a Responsive design. You can usually easily tell a Responsively designed website. These such sites all tend to display their content within rectangular blocks. These blocks themselves appear within other rectangular blocks. As you change the width of your browser, these blocks will ‘respond’ by changing to adapt to the width and height available. But they will always remain rectangular, be it on a desktop browser on on a mobile phone browser.
This type of design is not just rearranging boxes on a page, it’s more dynamic and fluid than that. When thinking about Responsive Web Design, try to think more in terms of fluidity and design flow within a structured system. This type of design will also be one that you may have to adopt a ‘break it, then fix it’ kind of attitude. Responsive Web Design is a process and takes some learning. Once you get in to the swing of it, you’ll get used to how to design within it. At first, if you’re new to this kind of design it could be frustrating so be prepared for this.
So Why Not Take The Easy Route?
So if you choose the Responsive route to your web design is it going to be more work than the effort? Initially it probably will be more effort. Learning about how Responsive Web Design works and can be applied to your ideas can be conceptually difficult. Your design will require rigorous testing too so you will need to have more of a break-fix mentality until the design is perfected for all device types. All this makes the notion of the fixed width page an appealing alternative. Like an artist, you can freely sketch out and fill out your site’s pages as you want to. Adjustments are easy to make as well and testing less arduous. Perhaps the biggest drawback of this design type, though, is that you’ll need to duplicate your effort to create pages for both desktop pages and mobile pages. As its name implies, fixed width is just that, fixed. If you create a page that’s 1000 pixels wide, it’s going to be problematical to display it on a mobile phone that has a width of about 400 pixels wide. Hence the need to create two sets of pages for your site. Additionally, you’ll need to update, test and maintain both sets as well. The reality as well is. that fixed width page types are also not favoured by Search Engines which prefer Responsive, Mobile focused website designs over fixed width designs.
So What’s The Best Way When Designing a Website?
If you can, building your website using a Responsive page layout is the best approach. You only have one page design to deal with, and you’ll get more attention from the search engines too. Google, Bing and Alexa prioritize mobile page designs and responsive websites over fixed width. Once you have mastered responsive page design, you’ll have less maintenance and updating to do later as well. over the years, EverWeb’s updated its own toolset which should also help you more easily build a responsive site. The learning curve may be steeper, bu the reward in persevering is better.
If responsive web design is too much of a stretch, though, go ahead and build a fixed width design using the centered page layout style in EverWeb. Getting your site up and running is actually more important then choosing one format over another. If it’s more comfortable and easier for you to use the fixed width layout then do so. Although search engines will favour you less in search engine results, you’ll still be included in SEO. You’ll also be able to take your time to experiment with converting your existing fixed width site in to a responsive one without the pressure of having to get your site up and running whilst learning about responsive web design at the same time. So, you can ‘have your cake and eat it.’ The other advantage of developing a fixed width site first is that you can get familiar with EverWeb before venturing in to responsive web design. The tools and features you learn initially can also be used in EverWeb’s responsive page layout so you don’t lose anything if you take this route.
Responsive design is ultimately the way of the future, and if you can make the jump, then we encourage you to do so. The next version of EverWeb should also give you more tools to make this easier if you’re a newbie or only have rudimentary skills in website building. If you prefer to stay with the Centered page layout, fixed width style of website, that’s actually not a problem at all and you can always move to a responsive design when you’re ready to do so.
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