RP - What I found out

Ok, so the Research Project hasn't been my strongest project during the course, but I've got to face it sooner or later!

My research question is: How is responsive design affecting the changing business patterns of digital marketing?

Yes, a bit of a mouthful!

In the document, I basically discussed how responsive design is affecting businesses and digital marketing and compared it to Mobile Specific websites.

What I found out:

• A responsive website is accessible at any given time, no matter the device being used.
•  You can provide consistent content across all devices or dictate which content is relevant to which device. This allows a better user experience but removing information that may not be useful to the end user.
•  Creating a website for every device can be costly. Save money as it displays on all devices.

It' obvious that having a responsive site will benefit both digital marketers, because it will increase their revenue, and also their audience. But this often makes many marketers think that because they have a responsive site, this will answer all the problems they are likely to encounter when delivering to mobile devices when often it's not be the case. The reason is that they have not really optimised user experiences at all. But, by utilising and creating separate mobile sites, marketers are more likely to consider the requirements of the end user
  

Advertising across multiple platforms is a major issue which is affecting digital marketing. This will not affect desktop users, as the ad will remain in the same place at the same size. But, for mobile users it is a major issue. For example, it is not possible to display a flash ad on a responsive site. This is because they too are a fixed size, due to their pixel dimensions, and since RWD has the ability to adapt to multiple screen sizes, this immediately eliminates this particular method of advertising. Taking this into account, text, images and videos are the only methods of advertising on a responsive site.

The simplest solution to this problem is to create ad blocks, utilising HTML, CSS and Javascript, which respond to the layout.

This is just a bit of what I found out. I won't put anymore here, otherwise I may as well post the whole document!

 

 

Testing Mobile Site

To test the mobile site, I used a program called Device Central. This is how the Home Page looked...

The other pages looked as expected too!

Mobile Designs

I'll just post a few designs instead of every page. they basically look the same anyway!

Testing on Ipad

I've just tested my site to see how it looks on an Ipad. I used this website http://ipadpeek.com/, since I don't actually own an Ipad.

This is how my Home Page looks:

So far, so good! I looked at the other pages, and they've all turned out as expected.

Onto Responsive!

I know I've left it a bit near to the deadline, but I am now making my site responsive

Already knowing how to make a site respond is an advantage and hopefully won't take me too long.

These are my tablet designs:

Learning a bit o' PHP!

The past few days I just could not get my contact form to submit to my email. I thought about it and realised that I've never been able to get it to work. But since this project is for a real life client, it's important it actually functions as planned.
 
I researched into ways of getting the form to submit, and decided to use PHP. NOTE: I haven't used PHP before!
 
It was a bit complicated at first to understand, but it got easier. I followed an example on this site http://www.html-form-guide.com/email-form/php-form-to-email.html and altered the code to suite my html code.
 
After I got it working, it suddenly stopped, and I had no idea why. I spoke to an Advisor on one.com (where the site will be hosted) who said you cannot submit a form to a Hotmail account. Well you can, but it will only let you submit about 15 emails a day. To solve this problem, it must be an email account within the site's domain. So for this client, the email I will be using is info@adoniahairandbeauty.com
 
What I learnt today: PHP isn't as scary as it looks, and I wished I used it throughout the whole site for the layout. It would have been so much easier! 

Problems

I've been testing the site in different browsers as I went along. I came across two main problems which I struggled to solve...

1. Search Bar

The search bar looked fine in Firefox, but not in IE8 and Chrome. I tried adding a height to the Input property, but this didn't work either...

I posted my problem on an online CSS forum to seek further advice. One person suggested adding padding directly to the input and removing it from the placeholders, which then worked!


2. Comment Box

I posted this problem in the same forum to seek advice. Turns out Firefox ignores some CSS properties in -moz-placeholder, like padding, margin, width, height. Therefore I added the padding to .input. Problem solved!

Coding

I've finally finished coding the Home Page. I won't put a screenshot of it up, as it looks pretty much the same as my design! Now that I have the basic layout, it shouldn't take too long to code the remaining pages...hopefully!

After I've finished building the basic site, I will post designs of the mobile site and implement that.