Today we are happy to make our big announcement official: you can now build mobile-first responsive sites on SignalMind!
(If you have already watched our responsive site builder videos or tried this feature - please note that we've made some significant interface changes and added features since our "soft" release a few weeks ago. More on that below).
Launching even a simple website that works across device sizes and is custom to your brand and your message has not been as easy as it should be.
Personally, I love Wordpress, and I have relied on it in too many occasions. With all the available plugins and themes Wordpress seems like the most suitable and universal option. Creating a website in Wordpress typically means one of the following:
- Designing creatives in Photoshop, approving designs with the client, and then coding the designs into HTML and CSS. The fact that this is expensive and time-consuming may not be a big issue with high-budget projects, but how would you even approach designing Photoshop creatives for all the devices?
- For low-budget clients or simple sites you would typically aim to find and tweak a ready-made Wordpress theme. And this is an almost sure case where the budget falls short of the effort required to build that site on Wordpress. The hope is to quickly find a perfect Wordpress theme to fill in with content. However, very rarely do we (or our clients) settle with these out-the-box templates. Most of us want customization or change preferences in the process, and all that requires time, coding - all too technical and time-consuming. And with all that work, sadly, the end result often ends up looking like a hack (not sure about you, but my brain is not wired to design well by making code changes to HTML and CSS in a text editor).
Again, don't get me wrong: I think Wordpress is powerful and extremely flexible, for projects that are beyond the "marketing site" (like this blog and MIX community). But we are talking about a basic marketing website (a site that has "static" pages and nothing else), and a tool to build it that is flexible enough to deliver on your clients' whims.
With SignalMind you now can build sites that are optimized across the screen sizes, and are easily adjustable to your or your clients' wishes in terms of design, content and layout. The new responsive site builder is in compliance with our principles of "No templates, any look you want!"
To prove the concept we went through the exercise of rebuilding our rather large signalmind.com site on our own platform. In the process we've made many adjustments to the platform to make things easier - for you and ourselves. After all, we are now committed to maintaining our own site on our prodigy child.
Check it out: signalmind.com.
What is Mobile-First RWD?
Mobile-first responsive design is an approach to responsive design where the mobile styles (CSS) are the foundation of the site. Although it is recommended that with the mobile-first RWD you typically start by building the mobile experience and enhance it by adding styles that apply to larger screens, many of us are still wired to design "desktop-first". If you are more comfortable conceptualizing the large screen experience first, you can do that with SignalMind responsive site builder, switching back and forth between the large and small screen preview modes.
Designing for mobile first, or at least giving the mobile and desktop experiences an equal priority (versus adding the mobile version at the very end) makes sense, considering that the share of mobile traffic is headed to take over the large screen traffic. It also ensures that your mobile site visitors have a complete experience, and the filler content is minimized.
Mobile-first RWD uses a reverse media query, where the mobile CSS definitions are the foundation of the page, and additional enhancements are added for larger screen sizes.
@media (min-width: 41rem) {
.. CSS for screens wider than 640px
}
The concept of mobile-first responsive web design has been around for a few years now, with several popular advocates behind it. As the share of mobile traffic is steadily increasing, bound to beat the large screen traffic (if it hasn't happened already for certain industries), it makes sense to build for mobile devices first.
A Responsive Site vs a Separate Mobile Site
In many cases it makes sense to launch a separate mobile site (for specific marketing campaigns, or if the business is happy with their current "full" site and doesn't want to invest in going responsive, or if the mobile experience simply needs to be different).
Typically a single responsive site is much easier to manage (no hassles with mobile redirects or maintaining a separate set of content). Also, if your client's full site does need a refresher (or your client has no website at all) - you now have a low-tech and flexible solution.
With SignalMind you now have both options.
Free Marketing Site for All SignalMind Paying Clients
If you are a paying customer of SignalMind (on a $15/month account or higher), please look for a new announcement that will pop up in a week or two in your admin dashboard. We are including a pre-built responsive marketing website for your business - at no charge, if you want to use it.
In fact, we are also making the MIX business resources available to all paying customers, including the ones on the Kickstart plan. Simply register there and send an email to our support to request your Premium Customer Access.