thender
crackberry storms
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY
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| cellphones, or the art of small screen friendly sites
The other day someone complimented me on my website(the one in my signature). I laughed and was confused, since this is little more than something I threw together in a text file and added CSS to. I'm no web designer and it shows in the hideousness of the site.
When I asked what made it good, he said it was the only one he found that loaded well on his cellphone. My guess was since I know nothing about good web design I couldn't implement any fancy stuff that would cause weirdness on a phone browser.
Since about half the people who view my site and call are doing it on either a phone or a machine with a cracked screen, this is important to me.
Are there any rules of thumb or tips on how to make a website more cellphone/small LCD friendly the more experienced designers on this forum have to offer?
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Macbook repair in NYC |
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twizlar
I dont think so.
Premium
join:2003-12-24
Brantford, ON | »www.alistapart.com/articles/pocket/ |
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usa2k
Please PRAY for Rebekah
Premium,MVM
join:2003-01-26
Canton, MI
clubs:
1 edit |  reply to thender
»www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html
The right CSS catered to "handheld" could have benefits. |
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thender
crackberry storms
join:2009-01-01
Brooklyn, NY
clubs: | reply to thender
Thanks, good information! |
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DC DSL
Stays crunchy even in milk
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join:2000-07-30
Washington, DC
 ·Covad Communications
·Verizon Online DSL
| reply to thender
What I do in ASP.NET is use a combination of master pages and CSS files for standard and mobile devices. If a request comes from a mobile, I dynamically switch to the mobile version. Presumably other environments have similar capabilities.
The key points are: •Keep the markup you're pushing as compact as possible.
•Design for a single column, flowed layout.
•Use only em or percentages for sizing (including text margins); px only for borders and body.
•Use only lowest-common-denominator fonts: arial, times new roman, courier, serif, sans-serif, fixed; avoid font calls as much as possible.
•Avoid overly large or small font sizes.
•Assume the worst and that your screen width won't be bigger than 200px
•HAVE ZERO DEPENDENCY ON CSS and javascript for anything to work.
•DO NOT USE FLASH for anything that the visitor does not have to explicitly download.
•Assume images will not render. Absolutely don't use graphics for "titles" or text.
•Include physical dimensions of images or tables.
•Create WAP-scaled versions of significant images such as logos.
•For variable images (such as a today's headline), if you are using ASP.NET or PHP you can resize images on the fly with some server-side code (beware of the load on the server, though). If you don't have the ability to do server-side resizing, specify width and the browser should do it (though likely with considerable loss of fidelity)
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