Web site design

[#1]

Pretty naive question.

When you design a website at the site login/attach process is it possible to determine the OS and screen size of the user?

I ask as a use a large desktop monitor, a website I use frequently has just  been revamped and shows the website as a thin strip down the middle of my screen, When I approached the company they said most of there users now login using smart phones so the website has been setup for smart phones.

Seems a bit lame as a reason!

[#2]

The modern way of having a websites frontend displayed is by the way of being 'responsive'. What that means is that the main factor for changing how something looks depends entirely on your screensize. It is no longer viable to serve up a different version of a website dependant on your browser and device because there are more devices, operating systems, browsers and screensizes than ever before. With responsive we take only the screensize into consideration (and even pixel density in the cases of icons).

With exception of the member centre, all Plusnet website are responsive. You can test if a website is responsive by resizing your browser window, things shouldn't scroll left and right, containers will stack and things should generally just be visible at all sizes.

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@journeys wrote:

Pretty naive question.

When you design a website at the site login/attach process is it possible to determine the OS and screen size of the user?

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This is done with Google Tag Manager these days to detect automatically. The website owners will collect data via the GTM/Analytics control panel. Should be no reason to expose a users browser or OS on the frontend.. depends on who developed the website.

[#3]

@jaread83 thanks for the update, it was not a PN site,

but http://www.peak-advertiser.co.uk/copy-of-classifieds-page-3?CID=4

[#4]

I have no idea what they are doing with this site... at mobile size it is (kind of) responsive but looks awful on a tablet

Inspecting the code reveals that they are using Wix which is an online website building tool. Its a cheap way to create a website quickly but is not as good as hiring a professional web developer as you don't get all that much control over how it works (from a code point of view). There isn't all that much else I can say about it... the CSS styling is very odd and the content is injected into the page via ajax.

Thats all my own opinion about it anyway. I would develop a website entirely different to how this was done.

[#5]

On my screen it looks worse...

[#6]

@VileReynard, yes I get the same, also very slow to refresh, and an add for website design pops out. randomly.

Very poor design, We've stopped advertising in the "Peak Advertiser", feel the paper is going down hill rapidly.