EPA responsive homepage at tablet size
By Danny Hart
Did you know we have a mobile website? For the last several years, this small version of our full site has provided a limited set of resources that work well on small screens. But it’s always been missing many features we have on the normal home page.
As part of our efforts to make our site work well on both a normal-sized monitor and on a mobile device like a phone or tablet, we’ve been rebuilding our whole website to be responsive. Which means the page changes based on what device you’re using to view it, navigation changes, images scale, content blocks wrap etc. And the home page presented some special challenges.
The responsive design offers you one major advantage over the special mobile site we currently offer: it will provide exactly the same information and links as today’s full-sized design.
We’re almost ready to launch it, but before we do, I wanted to invite you to poke around and let us know what you think. Here are a few points to keep in mind:
- You’ll see some features that look different on a small screen. That’s intentional. After all, large images don’t work well on many mobile devices. But everything should work, links should be clickable, etc.
- Where we can, we link to responsive pages from the home page. For example, our news releases have a responsive version that you should see when you follow a home page link. Same goes for our blog posts. But it’s not universal; we haven’t finished redesigning our entire website.
- In some cases, sets of links are collapsed into bars that open when you tap them. That’s another conscious choice as we thought through how to make things work best on small screens.
With that said, here’s the responsive design. Please share your thoughts in the comments!
About the author: Danny Hart is the Acting Director for the Office of Web Communications in the Office of Public Affairs.