Quote:
Originally Posted by raymor
AJ I'm working with some of your HTML right now. Your stuff looks good and if that works for you, great. Recently one of our customers asked us for a mobile version of our pages. He was very happy with the result. It looked nice on all the phones we tried and all the ones he tried.
What did we do differently on the mobile version? We REMOVED a line from our CSS and sent it back to him. That's it. Just removed one line that assumed a desktop size display and with that line gone it looked great on any display. I realize we were working with a very simple page, so tweaking it to not assume anything about screen size was pretty easy. On a more complex page, building it to not assume a certain size screen is a lot harder.
Definitely harder, but still perhaps worth the effort because I just gave a friend of mine her computer back. It has a 15 inch CRT running at 1024 x 768wide. My widescreen LCD runs 1920x1080 - twice as wide. When you make a "desktop sized" design, is that her desktop, or mine? Is she going to have to scroll back and forth like she's watching a tennis match? I'd rather take more time to make a design that works on her computer, my computer, my brother's giant TV, my mobile, and whatever sells big next Christmas. It is harder to keep in mind that you shouldn't assume the viewer's screen is the same size as yours when designing, but the payoff goes beyond this year's mobile devices.
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Ray, you nailed it. For a simple site what you did is all that's needed. Trust me, I wish we could get away with this approach but the goal of our mobile setup is to provide an "optimal" viewing experience that's intended for the behavior and ease of use of a typical mobile user.
I think that's what a lot of people don't get. It's not about making a site load or look good on mobile, it's about making it so people actually enjoy the site and WANT to access it on their phones. That's how stuff goes viral nowdays via social networking.
For the iPad tablet on the other hand, we do standardize and our default set of CMS templates scales and displays beautifully. The site auto-detects the device and serves HTML5 MP4 video and it looks amazing.
I'd love to be able to offer a "1 size fits all" type of template. Unfortunately given how much functionality our pay site setups offer, we would end up sacrificing something for either the PC viewer or the mobile viewer and that's just not an option. Someday perhaps. It sure would save us a lot of work! We're actually going the opposite way and adding MORE functionality to our mobile pay site tours and member's areas. I'm coding an entirely new set of mobile site templates for Elevated X as we speak
Nice to hear that the Strongbox pages are mobile now. That will be great for both our customers.
AJ