Sunday, March 22, 2015

JustLocal's main user interface is now "responsive" and mobile friendly.

I've wanted to adjust JustLocal to a more suitable design for mobile and small tablet users for some time. As from the 21st of April Google will penalise sites in terms of ranking on mobile devices, if the site isn't designed for a mobile device such as a mobile phone. This change reportedly does not affect tablets and desktops.

Given I'd already felt adjusting JustLocal to work better on the small screen of a mobile phone was desirable, I decided it was time to make the changes and I'm very pleased with the result.

On mobile phones and some small tablets you'll see a slightly different presentation than on the desktop. The desktop has a grid showing ten lots across. A lot being a single graphic linking to a business. On a mobile phone since you can hold the phone vertically or horizontally, you'll see four lots across when held vertically and five lots across when held horizontally. In computer terms the vertical orientation is called portrait and the horizontal orientation is called landscape.

One oother term you'll hear about websites is whether they're responsive or not. This isn't about how quick a site will respond to you, which is I feel how many people will think about the term. It is about how the site design responds when the user is using a different screen size device. The site is responsive if it adjusts to the size of the screen.

With the small screen design of JustLocal there's also two other slight changes. The menus across the top show a reduced selection of options and the banner section, where I sometimes display links to sites, will show less sites. You'll see in the following screenshots only the link for Conveyancing Melbourne is shown, whereas on the desktop quite a few more links are shown.

Vertical orientation


Horizontal orientation


I always enjoy watching JustLocal evolve and this change is particularly pleasing and will assist to help local businesses be found for some time into the future no matter whether people use a desktop, notebook, tablet, or mobile phone. Now as for smart watches, we'll just have to see how they evolve;-)

Kelvin Eldridge
www.JustLocal.com.au

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