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Handheld Design 1

The Web on my Mobile, or the Mobile Web?

Ideally, I want to surf the big ol’ WWW on my phone. But, drop down menus, scores of links, no mouse, and wide pages squeezed down into very very long pages makes the web on my mobile phone seem unusable.

Surfing the WWW on your phone is fairly expensive; many Networks, like Vodafone, are still charging by the MB, so the more pages you view, the more it costs you.

And even if bandwidth charges become ‘nearly free’, it’s pretty frustrating waiting for a large page to load; there’s just so much being downloaded that’s of no use to a mobile surfer.

Small Design

Using the Opera Mini browser mitigates some of the pain of mobile surfing, in fact, on comparison to the default browsers that come on most phones, Opera Mini is an absolute joy. I can’t think why anyone would surf without Opera Mini on their phone, I really can’t. Get it now if you haven’t already, it’s free and works on all java enabled phones.

So while Opera Mini and larger screened mobile devices make surfing more pleasurable, there is still a need for web designers to consider how people might experience their website on a small screen.

Web Designers – Embrace the Small Screen

“But my site isn’t designed for mobile use, it’s for people sat at their 1600 resolution flat-screen…”

As a designer, you may have a target market, but you have to accept that once your site is made public, people will discover it and experience it in ‘the wild’ in their own way. This may mean surfing it on their TV, or with all the images turned off in the browser etcetera.

The fist step is to create websites with complaint XHTML and CSS, and to dump ‘table based layout’. Then you need to consider the ‘Big 4’ ideas on mobilisation.

  1. Do nothing; you can rely on Opera Mini and feeling that mobile devices will just get ‘better’ at displaying the WWW;
    This doesn’t address the needs of mobile surfers, and doesn’t help people enjoy your website while on the go. 0/10.
  2. Strip out the style and render the plain semantic XHTML;
    If you’re able to make your server do this, then the plain HTML file with no style (no layout, no colour, just plain) may well work OK, but it’s still gonna be a very long page! 3/10.
  3. Offer a separate CSS for “handheld” devices;
    Just as you’re using a “screen” CSS, create a stripped down honed “handheld” style sheet. This would be the perfect solution except that a lot of mobile browsers out there don’t notice the “handheld” CSS and use the usual “screen” one… And of course, pages may well be very long again. 9/10.
  4. Repurpose all content for mobile surfing; reduce your 500 word essays to 100 words, optimise your images down to just 120px width;
    Does this mean that your mobile website looks a bit basic on a large screen? Yes, unless your server is able to sniff out the Operating System / Browser Environment and deliver appropriate content for the device. www.mtld.mobi is careful to offer similar content whether you surf on your computer or your phone, yet they actually offer different pages depending on how you access them. 9/10.

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