One of my previous clients approached me when they wanted to bring their site up to date with an upgrade from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7. It was not deemed necessary to redesign the site as the branding was pretty much spot on with the current design although I did introduce a few additional CSS3 tweaks and attributes that where not so widely adopted across the main-stream browsers when the site was initially created.
When their site was first created, Drupal 7 was still very much in flux with many contributed modules still not ported over to the latest version, it was for this reason that we chose to use Drupal 6 with its many stable modules that would give us many options for including additional site functionality.
In the field of Web design and development, we’re quickly getting to the point of being unable to keep up with the endless new resolutions and devices. For many websites, creating a website version for each resolution and new device would be impossible, or at least impractical. For this rework of the site design I have employed a technique of responsive web design to take into account this ever changing landscape in browser and device differences to allow us to serve the same content to each device but in a format that makes its consumption easier for the site visitor.
Walker and Peskind Responsive DesignResponsive Web design is the approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user’s behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation.
The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSSmedia queries. As the user switches from their laptop to a mobile or tablet device, the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities. In other words, the website should have the ability to automatically respond to the user’s preferences; or rather, the devices capabilities. This would eliminate the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market.
View the final re-design at www.azlawpartner.com.
