Responsive Design

[Neil Bayton]

Hi,

Please see the link below which hopefully will answer some of the questions above. However certainly worth giving sales a call on 0845 189 1859 or e-mail us on sales@sellerdeck.co.uk.

http://www.sellerdeck.co.uk/index.ph...ponsive-design

You all make good and relevant points above. Our customers have been telling us for some time how important responsive designs are for their business, we took this on board and have been working very hard for months to create a responsive design, we have now done this however it has not been without it's challenges. To this end we have a service where we will upgrade customer's sites for them to SD2013 in the new responsive design. Due to the correct processes that have to be followed we cannot yet release to partners or end users in the form of a maintenance release, however should customers see the benefit of upgrading their site sooner rather then later to responsive then we have a service now to which they can benefit.

Many of you have been long term associates of SellerDeck/Actinic so know how hard it is for us to predict the future, so although our preference would be to include responsive themes in the next full release of the software, this is not something we can guarantee and we don't know when this will be. We still anticipate however because of the complexities of a responsive design that help to upgrade will be needed at some point.

As mentioned above feel free to give us a call and we can have a chat.

Neil

[Buzby]

I think the next 12 months we will be thinking hard if Sellerdeck is the right software for us on a number of issues, this being one. I do hope that a responsive design will be included as standard pretty soon.

[Steve G Griggs]

It really does add up to more than just a responsive design layout though. The page layout is only a small part of it.
There is a whole load of optimisation would need to be made to give a good tablet/mobile experience. Navigation, checkout, optimising CSS, reducing http requests etc to improve page loading. Not to mention retina displays.
Also you may have increasing pixel counts on mobile device/tablet screens but, and its a big but, ultimately it's still a small screen and you need to make your page easily readable without too much zooming and scrolling.
Have you ever tried filling in form designed for a desktop screen on a mobile phone? I have and it's no fun especially if you miss a required input and have to start again. Especially if its a form with date pickers etc that reset when the form reloads to say you missed an entry. Even on an iPad it can be tricky filling in checkouts or booking forms.
It could almost mean a complete rethink of Sellerdeck and how it works to make a thorough job of it, rather than trying to add "resposive " layouts onto the system.

[jont]

Have you ever tried filling in form designed for a desktop screen on a mobile phone?

Trickier than playing Candy Crush with your eyes closed! I tried to make life easier on mine by stacking the invoice / delivery address fields on top of each other rather than side by side as per the standard desktop / responsive SellerDeck themes.

[jont]

Please see the link below which hopefully will answer some of the questions above.

Neil - the featured sections on the homepage are not clickable - for me using Chrome at least - is this by design?

[Mike Hughes]

Odd, but you're right. They don't work in Safari on an Ipad either.

Mike

[jont]

Not wanting to sound arsey but that example site is not doing you guys at SellerDeck any favours to either help sell your software let alone the theme.

Try adding some product text as a starter - even if Lorem Ipsum - I don't know of one site which has no product text in place against a product.

[Neil Bayton]

Hi Guys,

Although the Demo store in the responsive design will give you an idea of how the design responds this is not a live commercial site. The featured sections don't appear to work however im sure they should do, i'll forward this on to the managed services team. It's very likely they have been busy working on the pilot customers to notice.

What I would like to do is send you a link to our first pilot customers' site. We are in the customer feedback stage but hope to have this as a case study in the new year.

This is the design I would prefer you critique, however I also feel the demo store should work as designed as well.

We truly have been all guns blazing on this and have had quite a large pilot scheme running so hope to have more examples very soon.

I am happy however that you are all talking about this and please contact me should you require further information.

Happy Christmas.

Neil

[jont]

Neil,

happy to critique the site for you - I assume you will do this in private rather than open up a paying clients site for comments on a public forum.

[mash]

I am pretty sure that at the conference that this design was going to be available for free for cover customers, that was the 'take home message' I got.

Disappointing really, we held back working on the layout of our sites for this. We do need to think again how we go forward.

Mash

[kipper]

If the product does not come with up to date templates then it is not fit for purpose. Saying that, if you look at the example responsive template you can alter the css styles to suit your own site. I have spent a few days on my golf trophies website trying a mobile design 320px wide.

The hardest bit seems to be the checkout area where most of the fiddly inputting will be done. After moving the checkout buttons to float left and getting to the end I got to my payment page.

From my HTC One S, I entered the card numbers into my Cardsave payment page and the page keeps resetting so I cant enter my card numbers. Just emailed cardsave support.

The response from Cardsave was, "I am afraid we cannot guarantee that Cardsave will work on all mobile devices. It does usually work on Ipad’s etc aslong as they have WIFI connection. "

So if you look to make your website responsive make sure your payment provider can at least finish the sale. eeek.

[mje]

Forgive me for "picking holes" - but, is it not in Sellerdeck's best interests to be more accurate?

The original claim on your web page reads quite clearly "23% of all traffic on the Internet...." - you would appear to be missing a trick here, because the report says,

• 23% of all online retail sales were from mobile devices in Q2 2013

There is surely a massive difference between folk browsing the Internet using mobile and those that actually place an order using mobile?

So wondering what % of sales (not browsing) was from mobile devices for the full 12 months, not just one 1/4? And is the reported increase in sales completed using mobile devices. also seen in the 3rd and 4th 1/4 of 2013 ?

Full document - http://www.imrg.org/index.php?catalog=186

Not sure it is viable for us just now, unless of course customers demand it.

[Mike Hughes]

From IBM research for Cyber Monday 2013 versus 2012 (US based)

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pr...ease/42661.wss

Mobile Shopping Soars:

Mobile traffic grew to 31.7 percent of all online traffic, increasing by 45 percent over 2012. Mobile sales were also very strong, exceeding 17 percent of total online sales, an increase of 55.4 percent year-over-year.

Smartphones Browse, Tablets Buy:

Smartphones drove 19.7 percent of all online traffic compared to tablets at 11.5 percent, making it the browsing device of choice. When it comes to making the sale, tablets drove 11.7 percent of all online sales, more than double that of smartphones, which accounted for 5.5 percent. On average, tablet users spent $126.30 per order compared to smartphone users who spent $106.49.

Personally, I view tablets as more of an alternative computing devices rather than a mobile device you carry everywhere. i.e. much more like a laptop in form, carryability, capabilities and use than a mobile phone. I suspect Microsoft think the same given their determination to merge the tablet / laptop form into the 'surface'.

Which rather put's mobile (smartphone) down at 5.5% of sales.

Mike

PS. The IMRG summary isn't very clear on the details but does say 85% of mobiles sales they've been seeing have come from tablets, although smartphones have been seeing a higher growth recently.

[graphicz]

Skeleton is a responsive design, "Boilerplate for Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Development" free to use and abuse under the open-source MIT license. http://www.getskeleton.com/

It goes into Sellerdeck fairly readily but one has to go through changing fixed widths to Skeletons'columns' widths and have a show/hide on the menu and a bit of css to change it to vertical.

I am having a go at http://www.graphicz.gb.com/site1-skeleton/

It is by no means complete, I haven't even looked at the Cart yet, but have a look on computer then your phone and see what I mean.

[graphicz]

As it is based on Open source material I am tempted to allow people to download the snapshot to move it on. I am not sure if this would be acceptable to Sellerdeck. Any opinions? Can someone advise?