Audrey and her co-founders hired a development provider to build their marketplace. While the first version of her platform was okay, she has asked for some customization since then, and the design is not coming up properly on certain devices. Let’s explain for a bit the situation and what’s causing it.
Today I’m going to answer a question from Audrey, the co-founder of a working space marketplace.Her question is: “Why my developer is struggling to make a responsive design?”Before answering this question, let’s add a bit of context.Audrey and her co-founders hired a development provider to build their marketplace. While the first version of her platform was okay, she has asked for some customization since then, and the design is not coming up properly on certain devices.Let’s explain for a bit the situation and what’s causing it.When it comes to designing a website, there are two approaches.The first one is to design everything from scratch using tools like Photoshop, Sketch or Zeplin. This approach is the most time-consuming of the two, but with a good Web designer, it guarantees a better quality and full control over screen resolution.On the other hand, startups often get started with templates. Reusing existing designs that are already responsive makes us save lots of time. Any good developer can make it their own just by changing the colors, images and fonts.The problems come when we need to customize an existing template. Templates have their own structure. They are built a certain way that’s not always easy to understand for a developer.The point is, if you demand lots of changes from your developer, it might be overwhelming. Not only will they spend more time doing so than a Web designer would, designing it from scratch, but it will also complicate having a perfect responsive design, regardless of the structure.So if you are at this stage, where a template has become too complex to manage, you might consider investing in a Web designer to refactor the integration of your customer interface.In fact, good Web designers usually use tools like Zeplin that make it easier to adapt the interface behavior to the screen size and resolution. You can also convert Photoshop or Sketch formats into Web CSS or mobile application design code.If your developer is not familiar with these tools, which to be fair, are intended more for Web designers, don’t force these on them. Instead, try to find someone else to improve your design’s standard.So, to conclude and answer Audrey‘s question, using existing templates is like prototyping. It’s a very good way to get started. But in the long run, you will have to consider refactoring the design of your application with an appropriate and fully personalized code.Now if like Audrey, you have a specific question for your project, just go ahead and ask on: https://myctofriend.co/askI will do my best to answer your question by video or to redirect you to any existing content that will answer it.And also be sure to go through our other content here at myctofriend.co to learn more from real startup growth experiences and better manage your startup development.I’ll be waiting for your questions, and I look forward to seeing you in other videos.
