Guest dan_small Posted June 13, 2003 Report Posted June 13, 2003 Hi there, I'm looking to design a website or two that are optimised for the smartphone. Basically, what are people's fave small-screen websites? why do they work? what are the most annoying things people find when smartphone browsing? I know what i think - but it's quite likely that i'm a sad, strange individual - just trying to get a feel of regular user's views. Any comments / insults would be great, cheers mr d small
Guest martin Posted June 13, 2003 Report Posted June 13, 2003 Basically, what are people's fave small-screen websites? why do they work? what are the most annoying things people find when smartphone browsing? The amount of data that has to be transmitted across GPRS for each page has to be realistic in terms of download times and cost to the user. I suppose that trying balance presentation & content with data efficiency might be key to success ? Also naked woman on your homepage might score a few points. :lol:
Guest dan_small Posted June 13, 2003 Report Posted June 13, 2003 i'm definatly keeping it pretty much text only - but there's still a load of funky stuff that can be done - till they get that bandwidth up! of course there's gonna be nude ladies - this is the internet you know1
Guest XGEOX Posted June 13, 2003 Report Posted June 13, 2003 hi, and welcome to the forum :lol: I'm looking to design a website or two that are optimised for the smartphone. I'm doing the same thing atm - but mine's a games news & reviews site (although i'll probably get some pics of naked women in there somehow :wink: )... one thing im trying to avoid is making it completely text-based - most other smartphone sites ive seen are just ugly text-based info sites which aren't appealing to the eye at all - you can get away with images as long as they are few in number, well optimised, and put to good use. also you have to remember that unlike on a normal site, smartphone users wont have the same kind of navigation controls built-into their browser - therefore you have to make sure there are no dead-ends on your site. The same goes for links which open up in a new window.. thats one of the things i hate seeing on supposedly 'optimised for smartphone' sites. have a look at xgeox.uglybabystudios.com/SPV (it's not finished yet, but you'll see what i mean). oh, and if you need any further help with graphics n stuff, i'd be happy to help :D
Guest dan_small Posted June 14, 2003 Report Posted June 14, 2003 cheers xgeox, i checked out the site - very nice! i actually did my final year project at uni on the usability of small-screen web design. I didn't really have a platform to test on then - i just used a reduced browser window on my desktop! still, it was fairly interesting and now the smartphone has given me something to work with. most of the sites i've seen are laid out fairly similar (obviously a standard usable template has emerged) - i'm really just looking to see what's already out there, has anyone tried a different way of doing things? cheers again
Guest midnight Posted June 14, 2003 Report Posted June 14, 2003 xeog, err, looks nice enough, just one thing tho, PIE doesnt recognise CSS, so why use it? and also, for the standard browser window, why cut it down so small???? i have a 1280 x 960 display, and that tiny window on the standard screen size version just looks silly. If you are clever, you can use css to create a single screen that will display perfectly on both the pc and the smartphone. I did this with my old site, and worked really well. The way it works is this, use the fact that PIE doesnt understand CSS as an advantage.... use hidden css for things that wont display on the pc, but will suddenly be shown on PIE, and use images in css that are shown on pc, but are ignored by PIE. I may run a tutorial on this sometime in the future, only problem is, i heard rumours that sp2003 does actually interpret css and javascript correctly (not a real problem, in fact, better all round if this is true, lets hope they implemeny cleartype aswell)
Guest XGEOX Posted June 14, 2003 Report Posted June 14, 2003 xeog, err, looks nice enough, just one thing tho, PIE doesnt recognise CSS, so why use it? and also, for the standard browser window, why cut it down so small???? i have a 1280 x 960 display, and that tiny window on the standard screen size version just looks silly. If you are clever, you can use css to create a single screen that will display perfectly on both the pc and the smartphone. I did this with my old site, and worked really well. The way it works is this, use the fact that PIE doesnt understand CSS as an advantage.... use hidden css for things that wont display on the pc, but will suddenly be shown on PIE, and use images in css that are shown on pc, but are ignored by PIE. I may run a tutorial on this sometime in the future, only problem is, i heard rumours that sp2003 does actually interpret css and javascript correctly (not a real problem, in fact, better all round if this is true, lets hope they implemeny cleartype aswell) :? I didnt realise PIE didnt already support css - and as my intention was to make a site designed specifically for Smartphones, how it looked on a standard screen didnt really matter... but you're right - ill give the css trick a go. However - couldnt the same effect be achieved using tables? anyway, hopefully sp2003 will support javascript and css :lol:
Guest dan_small Posted June 15, 2003 Report Posted June 15, 2003 is there not a way of browser detecting PIE and redirecting to a version of a site designed for it?
Guest XGEOX Posted June 16, 2003 Report Posted June 16, 2003 I'm not sure how PIE is identified (is it differentiated from standard IE?), but i assume it is possible. I'm not sure why it is nessecary though - y not simply use relative-width tables? anyway, as our websites will both be optimised for smartphone, does it matter if they look small on a standard browser?
Guest FragMeister Posted June 16, 2003 Report Posted June 16, 2003 Check out this excellent post in the Articles section for checking whether the person is browsing on their smartphone and then present the appropriate page: http://smartphone.modaco.com/viewtopic.php?t=4386
Guest dan_small Posted June 16, 2003 Report Posted June 16, 2003 that article is great, cheers for that. it's useful as i want to use just one url for all platforms people could view on. relative table width is limited because sometimes the whole structure of the site is gonna have to be different for it to work on a small screen.
Guest Johnnyjohn Posted June 16, 2003 Report Posted June 16, 2003 Any comments / insults would be great you smell.... :lol:
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