Smart Responsive Design that can render your site to all shapes of devices has now been around for a while. There are numerous blogs and discussions about the subjects on the web. With more and more people asking for ecommerce sites that are also good on smartphone devices, we thought to do some extra work and work with Catalook and our partners Excommerce to bring the Responsive solution to DNN 7 and Catalook.



This approach dictates that design and development of the site should be done in a way that the products can respond to the user's behaviour and environment based on their screen size, platform and orientation. The practice consists of a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries and clever use of Java Script and JQuery. The problem is that this approach relies on the more advanced and modern browsers like Chrome, IE9 or later, FireFox, Opera and Safari. Older browsers can behave rather unexpectedly. But in general it is a small price to pay for opting to be in the forefront of technology and bringing your site up-to-date with current trends. One good thing is that on the smartphones all the browsers are advanced and can deal with responsive design.




In summary, whatever the end user is using to view the products - laptop, Android device, iPad etc... The products you are selling will automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities of the device and browser it runs on with minimum effort. Therefore the site will be able to automatically respond to the user's preferences. This new approach eliminates the need to have dedicated micro sites for various devices and screen sizes. The result is that you can now reach the fast growing mobile device users and get them to purchase your products, on the train, at work or in a bar and anywhere that they have time to be indulgent.

I thought I should also be honest and give you some of the caveats of this approach. But in total, you will find that the pain of producing two site with one for desktops and one for smartphones far out-way the benefits of one site for your product approach.

Benefits

• You will save time & money
• Adapts to fit any shaped device
• Advantage over Competition with Traditional shop
• Your site will be relevant for longer
• No need to create expensive Apps
• The store module is refined to deal with all this for you

Caveats   

• Navigation is not as easy as desktops 
• Data tables should be added with care 
• Old versions of IE the page is will not look great 
• Longer testing time but still less than doing two sites

In addition to this, DNN has also ability to have a great splash page that allows you to create a very advanced animation when people first come to your store and then move them to the standard homepage. This approach was very popular around 2004-2008 using Flash and most fashion sites used this to wow their customers.  So now this can be done with HTML 5 type animation and we plan to show you this approach in the next few weeks.

If  you require help with your brand new DNN7 portal and implementation of an Advanced Catalook Store, then please use this Quote Form to contact us.