Martin Ridgway

On April 3rd at 11:30am CST, I’ll be presenting at AMA Iowa on the topic of Responsive Web Design. If you’re in the Des Moines area on that day, and would like to attend, I’d love to see you there. Registration details are below.

Let’s get something out of the way right at the start: There is no such thing as the fold on the Web!! Anyone who tells you differently is more wrong than Wrongly Wrongham of 14 Wrongingford Road, Wrongleton; winner of last year’s Mr Wrong Contest.

Making images responsive on the Web is actually pretty easy. Don’t specify the width and height of the image, and include one simple CSS declaration, and bingo! Responsive images that scale beautifully as the page resizes and reflows. But what if you want a different crop of your image on a mobile device? Well, that’s […]

The Web marches inexorably forward, and we love to see the innovations that come from that progress. But usually, a proportion of your users won’t see the new hotness. They’re stuck on an old ‘n busted browser that they either can’t update (because IE8 is the highest version of IE available for Windows XP, and […]

A couple of years ago I was working on a small project where the client wanted to visualize data from their field operations on a map. Nothing overly complex – just locations, custom icons, radius of operation for that location, etc. Easy, I thought. We’ll use a system like Google Maps. Except the client wanted […]

We’ve all been there: A new technology emerges (cough Responsive Web Design cough), all shiny and spiffy. We get excited about it – tweet and blog our way around it for months – until our excitement and the sheer saturation from the community spills out into the wider business community. And at a certain point, […]

A little while back I wrote this nugget of wisdom: Creating a great user experience extends beyond the research, beyond the wireframes, and even beyond the visual design. All that hard work is ultimately for nothing if your website or web application isn’t fast. Why? Because if your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will […]

“To design responsively, one must prototype responsively.” – Martin Ridgway, 2013 Quoting myself. A good start. But honestly, the statement above is important. After all, how best to communicate principles of responsive design but to do it as early in the engagement as possible? However, prototyping should be fast and iterative. As of January 2013, […]

Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Courier New, Impact, Trebuchet and <shudder>Comic Sans</shudder>. Those are the basic web-safe fonts we’ve all been using for the majority of our text-based content since the dawn of time. Or at least, since the Web came along. If you wanted something “fancier” for your text, you had to use […]

Creating a great user experience extends beyond the research, beyond the wireframes, and even beyond the visual design. All that hard work is ultimately for nothing if your website or web application isn’t fast. Why? Because if your site doesn’t load quickly, your users will go elsewhere very quickly indeed!

Google has been pushing Responsive Web Design hard lately. In April they posted Responsive design – harnessing the power of media queries, which went into Google’s best practices for web development (spoiler alert: they like Responsive Web Design, a lot). There’s even a high-level tutorial for making your own site responsive.

When was the last time you saw a floppy disk (outside of a museum, or your friendly IT guy’s stash)? In all likelihood it’s been a while. There may very well be some of you reading this who have never actually held a floppy disk, let alone used one. Oh man, that makes me feel […]