Hopefully someone may know what I mean and where I may find such a thing.
I'm creating a new website and as part of it i'll be offering mobile web design. What I need if possible, is something that, should a user click on one of my examples, it load up a mobile browser (not the mobile site on a normal web browser). More like an emulator that will allow them to see working examples of potential sites.
Is there anything out there that will do this, or am I looking at opening a new window to a set size and displaying the site within it?
Please Note --- Whilst writing this out, I may have stumbled across a potential floor, as this may expose code.
I'm thinking I should perhaps consider putting JPEGs or PNGs that they can scroll through so not to expose the code behind the mobile site itself?!
If there is such an emulator or the likes that is available (and doesn't show code in the background) i'd be more than happy to be pointed in the right direction!!
Thanks
Paul
Please correct me if I misunderstood your question, but it sounds like you want to let users preview a responsive design at different screen sizes while denying them access to the source code.
If that's the case, rendering the design as a flat image file for previewing purposes is your best bet, even though it would sacrifice any interactive aspects of your design. It's a rough trade-off.
I assume you have a legitimate reason for hiding the code. But if haven't already, you might want to ask yourself what's motivating you to conceal your source code in the first place. The web is built on open standards and accessibility; you'll have to go through a lot of contortions to hide static assets like HTML, CSS, and javascript from a browser. I understand if you're concerned about a sketchy client using your work without payment, but that's more of a contracts/legal issue than a technical one.
That said, you can always place the mobile site's main content (or an image of the content if you must hide the code) within a div of a specified width and height to visually emulate a phone. Wrap it with some phone graphics, control the overflow with overflow-y: scroll; and overflow-x: hidden; and there you have it.
Web Design Weekly is a nice example of this concept in action.
EDIT: it occurred to me that another option you could feasibly explore is video instead of static images. Always an option if you need to wow a client. Typeform.com is a good example of what I'm talking about.
Related
So, I worked on responsive sites before but I'm on my way to build my first responsive site now. I opened some articles on the subject, and boom: Mobile First.. I have no idea how I skipped that concept till now. From the beginning I cant seem to understand whole thing (except that number of mobile devices will take out soon desktop computers) and here is why.
How I'm supposed to know how my site will look for desktop version, if I design it for mobile first? I mean, on the smallest device I will have to eventually hide some content etc, how I'm supposed to know what to hide and move things, when I don't know how the site will look on bigger screen? Isn't stripping the things easier?!?!
For me (right now), the Mobile First concept looks to me like building pyramid upside down.
Most implementations actually have two sites: one for browsers and one for mobiles. The webserver redirects the client to m.your-domain.com (or mobile.your-domain.com) if it recognizes it as mobile accotding to the user-agent.
Still, there's room for responsiveness since you might decide to consider different screen sizes, both for mobiles as well as browsers - for example: iPad browser might display things differently than chrome on desktop.
Remark:
Even though we already reached the point where major portion of the internet traffic is done by mobile devices, your site/service might be such that most of its clients will be laptops/desktops. Take Stackoverflow for example :)
You should use google analytics and see what's the split and decide according to that if it's really worth putting energy into it (and if so - how much).
In my opinion. mobile first applies more to apps than to websites. It is relatively easy to make a responsive website, or two versions of a website, to accommodate different screen sizes. It is much more difficult to create an app that works equally well on both small, mostly touch-driven screens, and large desktop screens. In applications the difference is more than just what information you can fit into an available screen real estate. Mobile applications often have a different UI flow and use a different set of components (widgets).
Once you have analyzed your requirements, you have to answer a key question: can a single application/website offer a great user experience on both desktop and mobile devices? If it can, go for it. If it cannot, then you arrive at the mobile first concept: these days it is often better to start with a mobile experience. It will work on large screens too, even though it may look a little strange and it will not take full advantage of a desktop environment. If you app is successful, you can always create a desktop-optimized version.
Note that I said "often", not "always". There are many applications that users still prefer to access from their desktops. If you build one of those applications, there is nothing wrong with going desktop first.
stripping away stuff scaling down your website to a mobile website is not a best practice. nor is mainting two separate websites. starting from mobile lets you focus on what you really need and on the content of your site. don't think "graphics" but think "content"
I'm a Ui/Ux designer, and I've been asked to give some advice on the architecture of an iPhone app, the said app implies a section called 'Help and guides' for the users to know how to properly enter their data in the app. While analyzing the app, I was going to recommand that it may be interesting to put that part in the settings, and I was challenged about the reason I would do that. All I could come up with was that it was kind of a habit to put it there. But indeed, why would we put the help in the settings?
While doing some research, it appears that the help and the FAQs are often placed in the settings of the apps, and I was wondering why. Even though it seems obvisous to me that this has evolve into a known pattern to the user, I was wondering if there was a proper justification for this practice. Any ideas or clues?
From my research into this as I am currently designing Android and IOS Apps. The reason to group both these items under the one menu is to keep the screen as clutter less as possible. Due to the screen size of a mobile phone, the need for space is high so removing the buttons by grouping them under the one menu helps greatly.
I would suggest possibly making a Menu button with the options to access help & settings as subheadings personally.
I am trying to convert my current website to a mobile version. I will be creating different views (I am using codeigniter) but want to make sure the CSS will look perfect on all phones. What are the universal/standard specs for a mobile website?
Also, what language is recommended? I was thinking just changing the CSS to a specific width and redesigning according to that width.
As there is no fixed limit of screen width/height of mobile devices. You must consider using percentage value for sizes. That way your mobile site will be more compatible.
For info on effective mobile websites, ie, what you should include and what not. Take a look here
http://www.qsrweb.com/article/202567/3-tips-for-creating-an-effective-mobile-website
For width related queries, see this,
Mobile version of my website, what design width is optimal?
A quick google search yields the following:
W3C's thoughts: http://www.w3.org/standards/webdesign/mobilweb.html
Smashing Magazine's thoughts (I have enjoyed some of their comparison articles before): http://www.smashingmagazine.com/guidelines-for-mobile-web-development/
You will want your page to be easy on the fingers, keep the text displayed to a minimum at first (i.e. summary + expanding things), and overall run fast. You will probably want to have multiple levels of fallback on things like CSS so that people running a CSS 1/2 browser can still use the website, even though CSS3 browsers may have a better experience.
Your site could also make use of media queries to choose a stylesheet based on the size of the user's screen (there are several standard sizes, especially if you consider the popular devices).
Javascript and other things like that should also work well for fallbacks. Using things like HTML5 canvases and WebSockets and such are good since they can be assisted directly by the mobile device hardware, but your script should handle those things not being available as well.
And, as always, an easy to navigate page goes a long ways just as it does with normal development. If the user can tell just by looking at the page how to use it intuitively (remember, intuitive for you isn't always the same as someone else), then I would think you are on the right track.
There are many takes on designing sites for mobile devices. The most straightforward, is to build an entirely separate user interface, just for the mobile site.
The next method would be to use CSS media-queries. This allows you to re-use your current UI and styling, but you can tailor it's content to specific widths and devices.
Lastly, is fully responsive design. It's rather similar to media queries, except that it uses percentages, instead of absolute pixels. It's the most seamless way, that a standard width-webpage can scale to fit the screen of a smaller mobile device. It can even scale up easily!
Here's a good place to start learning about responsive web design, and how it applies to mobile devices - http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/
Try scaling the size of your browser while on that site. Notice how the layout changes. That's CSS media queries at work.
hopefully my questions won't be too vague.
I designed a pretty simple website. You can see an image of it >>> here
But now I'm trying to make a mobile version.
However I'm contemplating using a different html for the mobile version since the desktop version has jquery pop-ups (prettyPhoto) and a very large backround that scales, which aren't great on mobile screens.
I'm unsure of how to do that. My first question therefore is:
1.) How do I call a different html for mobile?
Also, for tablets, the website renders pretty well in landscape mode but becomes weird in portrait mode. So my second question is:
2.) Can this different html be called based on width? If so, any ideas how?
So if tablet is viewing website in portrait mode, they get the mobile version, if they are seeing it in landscape mode, they get the desktop version.
I am not sure what you are attempting to do, but from experience as both developer and mobile user, what you propose is not a good idea. Again, since you have not mentioned what you are attempting to do, I am speaking generally. Consistency is very important for UX, and delivering completely different behaviours and looks for orientation does not sound like a good usability. Also, remember that on today's tablets, switching orientations is very easy. Would you load each version on each orientation change? What if the user is on 3G?
But technically, it is possible to load depending on width or orientation. Use AJAX, and load the appropriate content.
I'm trying to determine what kinds of interactions a mobile website can handle. For example, I obviously can't track page-level dragging operations because this scrolls on mobile browsers. So, I'm looking for demos that can tell me what interactions work, how well, and hopefully for information about how consistently that is across mobile devices. For example, I'd like to know if I had a page that fit on the screen, would my page elements receive mouse move events when I drag my finger? I could test that myself, but I figure there are probably lots of things that could be tested, so I was hoping there was something like the ACID test, but for mobile UI interactions.
I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, but the thing to remember is the browser is just one key factor in the interaction between your application and the user. The capabilities of the device itself is a large part of what you can and cannot do. For one, the iPhone has a full JavaScript stack and CSS rendering ability as well as the ability to "click". However, on a BlackBerry you're going to lose a lot of that CSS and JavaScript functionality. Also, with Nokia handsets you're going to be dealing with a different beast. The best way to develop for something like this would be to either use a framework/device template like the ASP.NET Mobile platform, or to go as close to basic HTML as you can.
There is no silver bullet, and you're just going to have to try to cover as much market share as you can. One thing I can share, is that the more standards compliant and semantic your markup, the better it will render across the devices. Sometimes, you can even get away with just coding the site once provided your site degrades well when CSS and JS are not available.