After much procrastination, the main site, https://www.kljcharters.com, was updated with a responsive design. Sorta. There are thousands (!) of pages that are not responsive, but the key entry pages have been revamped.
What is responsive design? The simplest explanation is: it works if viewed on a desktop machine, a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone. The pages are fluid, and readjust the contents to fit the size of the screen. Non-responsive designs (most web sites) have a fixed width, usually wider than a smartphone can display, or even some tablets, forcing the user to scroll horizontally.
There are many sins you can commit in creating a website, but forcing the user to scroll horizontally is usually fatal. Computers, tablets, and smartphones are designed for vertical scrolling. A word processor, for example, is essentially a typewriter with an endlessly long sheet of paper. Type away, and when you’ve added more than will fit on the screen, the screen scrolls – vertically. Software controls, mice, touch interfaces, etc., are all designed to easily handle a vertical scroll.
But a horizontal scroll incites anger and uncertainty. If the website visitor doesn’t simply give up immediately (the most common response), they are brutalized by trying to read content that requires scrolling back and forth. They can’t read an entire line in a paragraph, but must scroll from side to side, hoping that they don’t lose track of the narrative and praying that astigmatism doesn’t make things worse.
Accordingly, our site was (finally) updated with a responsive design. This is a “progressive” update, meaning that the many non-responsive pages will be updated as time allows. But at least the entry pages are easier to read.
Some pages on the site, by the way, date back to the previous century, before anyone even thought of tablets and smartphones. This is both something of an excuse (“It’s not my fault!”) as well as an explanation of why this will take some time to complete.
