Rian van der Merwe on Responsive Web Design in Africa

Responsive Web Design in Africa — Why it’s time to adapt

As responsive web design (RWD) continues to become the new standard for web development worldwide, there is still a lot of skepticism about its relevance in the African context. Since the mobile phone and data access landscape is so different here, many feel that it’s too early for us to spend time and money on designing websites that adapt to whatever device and viewport size might get thrown at it.

In this talk Rian will discuss how the web in general, and mobile context specifically, have changed over the past few years, and how responsive web design is the best approach to adapt to these changes. He’ll then address the major concerns about responsive design in the African context, point out the fallacies, and argue that overcoming the legitimate challenges are absolutely worth our time and effort.

He recently gave a version of this talk at Cape Town SPIN (http://www.spin.org.za/2013/04/08/ct-spin-88-rwd-in-africa/), and will be giving us more of a front-end twist to it.

About our speaker

Rian is passionate about designing and building software that people love to use. After spending several years working in Silicon Valley, he is currently Director of User Experience at consultancy Flow Interactive (http://www.userexperience.co.za/) in South Africa. He also writes regularly about design, technology, and software development for Smashing Magazine and his own site, Elezea (http://www.elezea.com/).