cookandkaye

scientific and technical website design projects news

Electronic and photonic molecular materials website

We created the Electronic and photonic molecular materials website a number of years ago. The design was based on that used at the time by the University of Sheffield, of which the research group is a part, and is still quite visually striking and effective (a lot more easily used and navigated than a modern ‘bootstrap’ site!) – on a desktop browser…

Over the decades the underlying mechanics of the web have changed – today sites need to be mobile friendly! There was a need for an inexpensive site update that would make the site accessible to mobile/phone format browsers, and work with a new HTTPS certificate.

The original home page had a series of eye-catching full page images displayed in a slide-show. The new home page serves one of three full page images tailored to wide screen, tablet and phone screens*. This reduces the bandwidth needed on mobile devices, which do not need to pull down the large format photographs, and so makes browsing the site a lot less painful on these devices. The low budget meant that we have lost the slide-show, so different banner images are served at random, with a new image being selected each time you visit the home page.

EPMM mobile screenshot

Above: A screenshot of the new Mobile-friendly EPMM website. The items in the menu bar were just a little too wide to fit comfortably accross a smaller mobile screen, so the link to the Department of Physics and Astronomy has been disguised as a shorter (but well known) equation (where else would you expect to go with the link F=ma?) …

* This used the HTML5 ‘picture’ element with artistic direction; so we have carefully chosen sections of the large image that give best impact at successively smaller screen sizes. The picture element is not available on Internet Explorer (note, this browser is now obsolete), or on older iOS devices. In these instances the visitor gets the rather over-large banner image.