I’m pleased to announce the brand new, ground-up rebuild of epubBooks! For this release I wanted to create a design with an emphasis on mobile users, which will give a much improved experience to those with tablets and smartphones.
Over the last coupe of years the type of visitor coming to epubBooks.com has been more and more mobile based, with almost 60% using the site on a smartphone or tablet — the old design didn’t work too well on any device with a screen resolution less than 1024 px, which meant anyone viewing the site on an iPhone, Windows Phone, or any other small screened device had a difficult time reading the text and navigation the site. Even those of you on 7 inch tablets, like the Google Nexus, spent a lot of time zooming in and out.
The new site uses what’s called a responsive layout, which means that the page sections move to best fit whatever screen size you’re on; text and some images will resize, especially for those smartphones with screens of just 480px.
For this redesign, I focused first on making the layout work great for iPads and 7 inch tablets (in portrait mode). Once that looked good I only needed to make some small adjustments for larger tablets and the smaller iPhone, Nokia Lumia and other smartphones. Lastly, I adjusted things for desktop’s — in fact, the large desktop layout still needs a lot of work, but I think that’s worth it for what tablet users are gaining.
The new epubBooks is probably one of very few ebook sites – if not the first – to use a responsive design aimed straight at mobile users. It’s certainly the future of website design and I don’t expect other sites to be far behind.
Please note that this current release should be considered “Beta” as there’s lots of missing functionality, ie. no search feature. However, this ground-up rebuild is going to allow me to introduce many new features not previously found on epubBooks — more on those in a future post.
I hope you enjoy the new easier to use design and if you have questions or find any issues, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Header over to the epubBooks homepage here.