Datasheet

FUTURE-PROOF WEB DESIGN

iOS). In my opinion, however, beyond those exceptions, web apps are the better option:

You ensure that users have the most recent version, you can build for every platform

equally, and in most cases, web apps can be made to perform o ine.

Beyond design: An essential business guide

Because building sites is a business for many (if you’re reading this book in an attempt to

improve your own quality control, this includes you), I need to o er some cautionary

words about how striving to survive the Web’s future may a ect the way you craft or

maintain interfaces, and how you bill for doing so.

First, the all-important consideration: money. Budgeting for the work you will do to bring

an older, less  exible site into the “here and now” is a complex calculation. At one time,

you could design sites so that they were cross-compatible by writing well-formed code

(which designers often failed to do). Justifying it as cost-e ective wasn’t di cult because

you could literally see bandwidth bills drop (moving on from messy and inaccessible table-

based layouts). Now it’s a di erent story with fewer immediate gains or losses involved

(see Figure 1-12).

Figure 1-12:  e extra costs of ensuring  exibility can result in a bigger audience.

Building a mobile-friendly site demands regular testing, and not on the same level as in

the old days. Testing on large numbers of browsers, both desktop and handheld, can

adversely a ect billable hours, and testing on physical devices could potentially be very

costly if you want to guarantee device-speci c support. Because of the overwhelming

array of possible combinations of browsers and devices, testing on all of them will be

impossible, so you need to  nd ways around this issue in order to test as economically and

accurately as possible.

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