Having just set up a new site, called Typography Links on tumblr, I wanted to know how many people actually click on the links to the sites that I post.
Having used tumblr for the first time, I didn’t know of any way to track this, and although I could use a URL shortening service like bit.ly, i’ve never been a huge fan, as they mask the location you are being directed to.
It baffles me how Twitter, with all it’s brainpower can’t handle URLs properly. For example, highersites.co.uk wouldn’t appear as a link, nor would www.highersites.co.uk, and yet whilst typing this on my phone, the WordPress app asked if I wanted to make a link.
Nobody *ever* types the http:// unless they have to, and especially when that alone takes up 5% of the total tweet length.
And this Twitter URL thing makes the whole thing look even more ridiculous. I mean, why rewrite all of the domains, when the tweets become unreadable, especially if you want to refer to the domain name.
Does this annoy anybody else, or is it just me?
I am a real fan of responsive web design, however there are many more sites (and books) that can explain the topic far better than I can (I’ll list a few at the end of the post).
In short, if you don’t know what it means, it is the idea of a site design that changes its layout depending on the device screen size that is viewing it.
With smartphones and tablets being so popular in the last few years, many more people are browsing the web on these devices, and providing an optimum design for these devices makes sites more engaging, easier to read and better suited to the device.