What is the best practice for creating a mobile/tablet site from an existing website?
I have been researching responsive webdesign but it seems that i would need to recreate the site from the ground up as the site is badly tagged and designed.
I was thinking of creating a separate site for mobile/tablets that uses responsive design but show the old site for people browsing on desktops.
What do you think is the best solution? Have you had any good/bad experiences with responsive web design?
I suggest which is a great framework to RWD (responsive web design). It has support from cell phones to tablets of wide screen. This is a case study about the framework.
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I see so many people are going for mobile-first approach rather than desktop first.Anyways we have to do mobile responsiveness to be good using media queries or some responsive frameworks(if i need mobile responsive website).Even i choose desktop-first approach. why the people has started the term mobile-first approach and they are using it.
Been wondering lately about responsive vs mobile site, especially for ecommerce. I have a rather big project coming up and it seems like it will be a relatively heavy one (in terms of templates and functionality). So immediate thought is to do a mobile site to cut on certain functionality that may be performance heavy but not that required. But does this make sense these days? Would there still be advantage of going mobile with ecommerce, or perhaps should just do a responsive?
There are advantages and disadvantages of doing a mobile site and a responsive website. I've recently went through this decision in my work as well. The points below are the main points I looked at when updating my website.
Mobile:
- Specific site created for mobile devices
- New domain name needed for the mobile site
- This may need to be updated as new phones are developed or new screen sizes are developed.
Responsive:
- Site is adjusted based on the screen size of the users device
- Lots of up-front coding needed
- No specific mobile domain needed.
- Currently no new code needed for new device sizes.
Although there was a lot of back end work (and I'll be honest there was a lot of back end work!). I think choosing responsive was right for my situation.
If you plan to use the website for a long period of time and you have the resources and time to devote to a responsive design I believe it's worth it.
One of the most compelling reasons for making a responsive e-commerce website is that Google recommend it!
Bear in mind Google's market share and that most of your SEO effort will be for Google. The following configuration is detailed by Google, the highlight is their own:
Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all
devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML
to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered
on the device. This is Google’s recommended configuration.
Moreover, with frameworks like Bootstrap responsive websites are relatively straight-forward.
committing to a separate mobile website is a commitment to its ongoing maintenance -- so there has to be the budget/resources to do that.
another alternative is to use a front end framework like (twitter) bootstrap 3 that allows the website to be 'mobile first'. this was the breaking change between bootstrap 2 and bootstrap 3 -- bootstrap 3 looks for mobile devices first to speed up the rendering.
http://getbootstrap.com
the code needed for bootstrap 3 is relatively easy to implement -- but it is a commitment because all of your templates and forms and layout all have to be done with its code.
i am using bootstrap 3 for e-commerce and its great. a huge advantage of using bootstrap 3 is that as new phones etc come out, they are testing etc. some people complain that bootstrap sites look the same -- but for e-commerce -- having the interface look and feel 'familiar' for customers is good for sales.
Came across a great list of current mobile frameworks. With such a huge variety I find it difficult in making a decision as to which to use for a web application to be used on both desktop and mobile.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_phone_web_based_application_framework
Has anyone used any of these?
Can any be extended and-or repurposed for use on the desktop?
I would say phonegap is your best bet. As you can use javascript, CSS and HTML to build it, you can definitely reuse that for desktop.
I am creating a mobile site and working on WAP for the first time and my main concern is that the site should render properly possibly on all handsets.
So,I was thinking to adapt responsive design approach.
But then I came across this sites :
http://www.webdesignshock.com/responsive-design-problems/
http://dapurpixel.com/blog/articles/responsive-web-design-pros-and-cons/
So,please provide some best practices to follow while developing mobile site. I googled it but it showed my tutorial for responsive design and I am not sure that this is the optimum method.
Thanks
It all depends on the website you are creating. Some type of websites (such as blogs) are really easy to make as responsive design. But some other websites (e-commerce, news magazine, deep websites) should be adapted specifically for mobile and tablets. Why? Because making the website adapts its width and column layout is often not enough.
Also keep in mind some features such as mouseover is rather complicated for tablet users. So menus with click that opens an accordion menu is simpler and feels more right. Creating a design that would work for everyone (One design to rule them all) could take more time to implement than simply creating a specific version of your website for handheld devices.
So it all depends on the nature of your website.
I already have a website with huge database which is good for Desktop browser my site is on Joomla base. Now i want to develop for Smartphone (like iphone, android, nokia) and mobile browsers. So how can i achieve this goal what is the best way of doing this.
Mobile Sites like Yahoo, Youtube i want to developed something like this because i'm new to developing mobile sites so any one can suggest me the right way for developing the mobile version for my current Desktop Site.
Thanks in advance
There are extensions for Joomla that style your site for mobile usage here: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/mobile.
It makes sense to test your site using the emulators for iPhone, Android and Symbian at some stage before you release. Each software development kit includes the ability to use the mobile browser.
Note that this is not the whole story. You'll want to consider:
Mobile users have much smaller displays. You'll need to rework your UI to take account of this.
Mobile users have large fingers. You'll need to rework your buttons and links to take account of this.
Mobile users tend to consume content rather than create it. Optimise accordingly.
Searching for data with e.g. traditional search boxes is tricky; you may need to rework to use scrolling through lists.
Above all: test, test, test!
Have a look at http://www.mobilejoomla.com/