News Courtesy of co.design:
Building a website is no easy task. When I sat down to create a site to show off my writing, it took hours of digging around online to find a template that looked similar enough to what I wanted, and hours more to personalize it. Half the time, I wanted to alter some piece of the site’s design but no amount of frantic searching helped me build the site I had imagined.
An app called Universe aims to change all that. It helps you build an endlessly customizable site in just a few minutes, all from your phone. Since the app launched in March 2017, more than 150,000 sites have been created on its platform. And after finishing the prestigious accelerator Y Combinator earlier this year, Universe is beginning to roll out a “pro” subscription service, where subscribers can use their own domain names, get analytics for their sites, and remove the startup’s bottom-of-the-page branding for less than $15 per month (the startup is still testing prices).
Ryan’s Take 
Having checked out a few of these Universe websites, they are pretty unique looking. Do they look professional looking? Not at all in my opinion. I don’t think the creator of this mobile web design app is looking to cater to businesses, rather individuals who want to showcase their work or portfolio. Fair enough. They seem to flow and format just fine on smartphones. However, looking at an example site on my laptop made the site format in an awkward narrow manner. I certainly don’t see the app taking off into the mainstream web design community.
I still believe you need a true responsive website design to effectively reach an audience across all the devices. While mobile browsing is outpacing desktop browsing every day, that doesn’t mean that you should abandon designing and formatting for desktop browsers. When I think back at technology and displays, it wasn’t that long ago when square televisions were the norm. Then we started to see widescreen tv’s that simulated that movie-like experience. Now it’s like we are going in the opposite direction with smartphones. Long and narrow screens are great for reading. Although it makes prioritizing content much more difficult with this lack of screen space.
