what's it all about?
hypermobility
Our methods yield exceptionally detailed control and customization of the mobile experience for your visitors, across the entire range of viewport families. Litttle tiny phones to great big monitors.
uncompromising
To get websites to work on phones and tablets, we used to have to make lots of compromises. The design needed to be dumbed down, content stripped away, photos, graphics and video hidden from view. No longer.
The techniques which we use allow us to show mobile users a faithfully accurate miniature version of the same expansive, beautiful website they will see on their big desktop monitors. None of your branding, none of your messaging, needs to be diluted. It's all you and nothing but, 100 proof.
The website detects the size of the visitor's viewing screen ("viewport"). Then it rearranges the layout and resizes elements to fit just right. We regulate this behavior by setting general parameters within what are called the viewport families - the major categories of viewing devices.
a family affair
Across the mobile-responsive web design industry a standard convention has arisen. It divides the vast range of nonstandardized viewing devices into three families.
• mobile - phones, all orientations
• tablets - medium-sized portable touchscreen devices, all orientations
• desktop - computers with large attached screens (laptops) to HD widescreen monitors.
By optimizing our page design for each of these three families, using a programming scheme called breakpoints, we come up with something that works. However it just looks pretty good. Why?
The three industry-standard families are gigantic. Within them there is huge variation, and they overlap. It's a shotgun approach to mobile-responsive design.
By applying some old-school custom CSS commands, we can bring a higher degree of fine-tune control to our responsive pages. There is still a place for custom coding in mobile-responsive design.
For most of our customers, however, pretty good isn't good enough. It's a competitive issue, and they want the ultimate.
Here's a better way to go. It involves working not with the standard three viewport families. At Javelin we use six.
• small mobile - phones, vertical orientation (portrait mode)
• large mobile - phones, horizontal orientation (landscape mode); includes some small tablets
• small tablet - medium-sized portable touchscreens, vertical orientation (portrait mode)
• large tablet - medium-sized portable touchscreens, horizontal orientation (landscape mode); includes some compact laptops
• small desktop - large laptops and compact computers with freestanding monitors
• large desktop - compact computers with big HD monitors
why it matters
We believe that the best user experience always uses the entire available screen. Our sites feature big multi-column layouts for large viewing devices. These scale down beautifully for small viewports, without losing anything in translation. So often you will view a website on your desktop monitor. And you will behold a blown-up version of the same website that displays on your phone. All content will be in one column, centered. That's the super-easy way to do it. It looks like kid stuff, because it is kid stuff. Not for companies who are serious about putting forward a sophisticated image.
google loves it
Hypermobile web design is another reason why so many of our customers got to number one in Google. In ranking websites in its index, the company considers the mobile view first. It wants seamless synergy between the view of your website on small devices and the view of your website on great big screens. And that's our forte.
a family affair
Across the mobile-responsive web design industry a standard convention has arisen. It divides the vast range of nonstandardized viewing devices into three families.
• mobile - phones, all orientations
• tablets - medium-sized portable touchscreen devices, all orientations
• desktop - computers with large attached screens (laptops) to HD widescreen monitors.
By optimizing our page design for each of these three families, using a programming scheme called breakpoints, we come up with something that works. However it just looks pretty good. Why?
The three industry-standard families are gigantic. Within them there is huge variation, and they overlap. It's a shotgun approach to mobile-responsive design.
By applying some old-school custom CSS commands, we can bring a higher degree of fine-tune control to our responsive pages. There is still a place for custom coding in mobile-responsive design.
For most of our customers, however, pretty good isn't good enough. It's a competitive issue, and they want the ultimate.
Here's a better way to go. It involves working not with the standard three viewport families. At Javelin we use six.
• small mobile - phones, vertical orientation (portrait mode)
• large mobile - phones, horizontal orientation (landscape mode); includes some small tablets
• small tablet - medium-sized portable touchscreens, vertical orientation (portrait mode)
• large tablet - medium-sized portable touchscreens, horizontal orientation (landscape mode); includes some compact laptops
• small desktop - large laptops and compact computers with freestanding monitors.
• large desktop - compact computers with big HD monitors.
why it matters
We believe that the best user experience always uses the entire available screen. Our sites feature big multi-column layouts for large viewing devices. These scale down beautifully for small viewports, without losing anything in translation. So often you will view a website on your desktop monitor. And you will behold a blown-up version of the same website that displays on your phone. All content will be in one column, centered. That's the super-easy way to do it. It looks like kid stuff, because it is kid stuff. Not for companies who are serious about putting forward a sophisticated image.
google loves it
Hypermobile web design is another reason why so many of our customers got to number one in Google. In ranking websites in its index, the company considers the mobile view first. It wants seamless synergy between the view of your website on small devices and the view of your website on great big screens. And that's our forte.
'do you use amp?'
No. And you know why, if you are well-versed in the topic. But here's a little background for visitors who have heard of Google AMP and that's about it.
purpose of AMP
Google launched its "Accelerated Mobile Pages" project in 2016. It was designed to speed up loading of web pages on mobile devices.
how AMP works
Google saves a copy of your page to its server. Then it strips out all decoration and content deemed extraneous. It serves this ultra-simple barebones version to your visitors. The URL is full of gobblygook and leads back to Google, not your own domain. All AMP pages look pretty much alike and you can't change them.
is it still relevant?
Increasingly not. Today AMP is mainly used by news sites and blogs - entities which publish lengthy articles. It never really took off due to rapid advances in mobile web technology - SSD servers, bigger bandwidths, faster data transfer, better devices, smarter web design tools. We don't have to strip out any of your precious branding, and the page will still load lickety split on smartphones. You - not Google's algorithm - get to decide how best to present yourself.
is it here to stay?
That looks more and more doubtful. After initially trying to force everybody to use it, Google backed away in late 2021. They dropped AMP as a ranking factor for their directory.
is it good for anything?
It can be a reasonable alternative for people who are making very simple no-budget DIY websites and don't know anything about mobile-responsive design. Some DIY hosted builders like Wyx and Squarespace will allow you to use AMP for blog posts but not for your more elaborate web pages.