In this section, you will learn some of the best practices and paradigms that will help us in achieving the actual goals of web development:
- Brick-first design paradigm: When constructing responsive sites, it is better practice to base our design about mobile devices as our baseline, before adding the extra functionality to manage desktop use. Our mindset should be to incorporate the bare minimum required to satisfy users on mobile devices.
Today, we know that a major portion of sales of mobile devices annually has been overtaken by smartphones. Although a large percentage of users do not buy mobile devices frequently, they still have devices which are capable of supporting web applications and even native applications. Adding to these numbers we still have those people who use some old generation smartphones too. We can even add other devices like Kindles and semi web-capable devices; if we add these numbers we might reach a staggering sum!
Now for this huge audience, let's consider some cases:
- They are not going to carry out research
- They are not going to read long articles
The chances are that those users with older cell phones might have to navigate the page using a standard key pad similar to a normal landline phone, rather than benefit from using a standard keyboard.
The small size of screens on older devices makes it harder to provide a mobile-first layout; it makes it ever more important that we only display the bare essentials for these users, and that other elements are removed from display or download.