In October 2012 the number of smartphone users globally exceeded 1 billion. Browsing the internet has now become the primary use of smartphones – phone calls being the fifth ranked activity.
In the UK the average smartphone owner spends more than two hours each day using the device. During that time, smartphone owners spend an average of 25 minutes using their phone to browse the web, 17 minutes on social networking, 13 minutes playing games and 16 minutes listening to music.
Responding to this increasing shift to web browsing through mobile devices, on Friday 7 December iSolutions released a new development so that all websites built within Site Publisher are now ‘responsive’. This means that their layout changes to fit the device of the user allowing for a much better user experience, especially on mobiles and tablets.
The menu also works in a different way, and is designed to replicate sites and applications such as Google and Facebook. The touch/swish features will follow in a future release.
The Digital Media team in Communications and Marketing are now working on moving videos to our new YouTube component released last week, to ensure they too are responsive on the page.
You can see your academic unit or research site in its’ different layout on your computer, by reducing the size of the browser window in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 9 (n.b. IE8 does not support the responsive code). If you have one of those browsers click on the following to see how the web page responds, or use your smartphone/tablet.
Simon Peatfield, Director of Communications and Marketing comments: “This is a significant and important change which puts Site Publisher sites ahead of many of our competitors and is a great step forward for our web presence.”