The Addictions UK website is getting a facelift
We have been delighted over the years at the number of visitors to the Addictions UK website who have commented on how welcoming it looks and how easy it is to find your way to information about home-based addictions and detox treatments and all the other services we offer.
So if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
We have been monitoring a trend which shows people using their mobile phones and tablets to access the Internet. Traditional wide-screen websites are hard to view on some devices – either the font is too small to read or you have to swipe right and left as well as up and down to follow the text and find links to more information.
The old-fashioned, “better than nothing” fix, which we and most others used, was to offer a separate “mobile website” which at least gave a tiny bit of basic information and some contact details.
But we have long been aware that is not the best solution, especially for a website to which addicts and their friends and families may turn in desperation, grabbing whatever Internet-connected device is nearest at hand.
Twitter was one of a few organisations that really faced up to the challenge of making websites work on all sorts of devices. They invited the whole web community to share in the development and deployment of a new system for “Responsive Web Design” which they called “Bootstrap” – a collection of stylesheets and bits of code that would adjust the elements of a web page to flow gracefully into any width of screen.
Addictions UK has been planning for some months to bring this technology to our website and, by happy coincidence, just at the moment we began to deploy the upgrade, the press was reporting the tipping-point when more visits to websites everywhere are coming from phones and tablets than from desktop computers.
So, starting with this Blog we have begun to roll out our new design across the site.
The old, wide menu bar has to go – that’s not adaptable to a little mobile phone screen. But click (or tap on) the drop down menus above for the main sections of the site and you will still find all the familiar links to the information you need about home-based addictions recovery and everything else we offer. For a while, our pages will be a mixture of old and new as we check and revise their contents and update the layout.
We aim to keep our bright and interesting illustrations, so far as is compatible with fitting the pages to every size of screen. So we hope you will see your old friend in a change of clothing rather than a complete new fashion!
If you see anything here that prompts you to comment or to ask for our help, please contact us now on line (using the button at the bottom of every new-design page) or telephone 0300 330 30 40.
