I host a small web shop for a client who wants it to be easily accessible from mobile devices.
How do I detect if the user is browsing my site from a mobile device?
When I have done that, should I:
Check if the user has mobile device and then forward them to another site?
I think the advantages would be:
I can optimize layout from both sites for screensize
I can use different techniques in the two sites (eg. jquery mobile for mobile)
Use CSS for the different screen sizes => like on tutsplus
I think the advantage would be:
I only need one site but it seems to me heaps of work when talking about a small webshop
Ideally, you should try using jQuery Mobile page structure with your own CSS and JavaScript for non-mobile devices.
You can easily detect user's browser and conditional script includes as per html5 [boilerplate]:3
/* Grade-A Mobile Browsers (Opera Mobile, Mobile Safari, Android Chrome)
consider this: www.cloudfour.com/css-media-query-for-mobile-is-fools-gold/ */
#media screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
Main things to consider when aiming at iPhone users:
ensure there's no vital flash objects
on the page as it isn't supported by
many mobile browsers (yet?)
appropriate screen size (using
viewport meta tag)
keeping in mind that there's no mouse
cursors, meaning no
hover/double-clicks are available any
mouse dragging gestures are different
on touch devices
remember all pop-ups are open in new
tabs and won't be seen at the same
time as the main window, use
javascript modal divs as alternative
test all your javascript and css to
ensure everything looks and works the
same (Safari requires -webkit- prefix
for the newest CSS properties)
create a Home screen icon for your
website (a nice thing to have)
most of these things are covered here
take a look at Safari Dev Center for tutorials/videos/coding how to's etc.
There are several options but this is my favorite:
http://code.google.com/p/mobileesp/
Comes with a API in a couple of different languages as well
You don't need jQuery at all if you don't want to use it. We don't. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Number 2 is the best option. If you create a site with mobile in mind first, it's far, far easier to expand and manipulate for the desktop than trying to shrink things to a mobile screen.
JQuery Mobile is currently in beta 1 right now. Beta 2 will be out within a month. It is fairly stable at the moment and you can gain a lot of knowledge about what is considered "best practice" from them. You can use media queries for screen sizes for different platforms which JQuery Mobile also supports.
http://jquerymobile.com/
Related
I am a web developer and do not have any experience with developing mobile friendly websites.
When we are developing a mobile friendly website, do we need to create separate files for mobile version? Or can we use same files that we created for desktop version?
I recommend that you use one file set with a responsive design.
there are different ways to do this.
1) You can use bootstrap for that.
2) What I sometime do is that i use the css #media. Take for that a look at this link.
If you are going to develop a big site like flipkart, ebay or facebook, then its better you do separate mobile version, because such type of websites will take more time to load in mobiles. You need to display only relevant content in mobiles.
If its a simple website, better use Bootstrap.
Both you can make one file launch another, or have one big monster file.
How to detect Safari, Chrome, IE, Firefox and Opera browser?
But I think this might be more of what your looking for.
This is how I did it. It could fit only my design. My pages look like a blog page. The DIV floating left is the main content. Then I follow it with small DIV boxes for ads. The main DIV is 40em wide. And has side margins 4em each. That totals 48em = 768 device pixels.
So, I added the following meta instruction to every page:
<meta content="width=768" name="viewport">
That nicely gets the page on the smartphone, except the text is too small. The ads slide down to the bottom. Next, I went to my CSS file. There, I format my regular text with 'para' class:
.para {font-size:1.2em;line-height:140%;font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;color:#333}
#media only screen and (max-width: 768px) {.para{font-size:2em;}}
The upper line is for PCs and the #media one is for phones. Notice that I increased the text size to 2em for the screen just 768px wide.
This all passes Google Mobile Friendly test. You can view-source my web site:
Read source-code of this and test it here.
NOTE: I keep changing my work. This site might be gone in few days.
Good luck.
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.
I'm a big fan of Zurb Foundation. They just released Zurb Foundation 4 which was redesigned to be mobile first. I'm fairly new to responsive design taking into account both mobile, tablet, and traditional desktop experiences. I'm trying to wrap my head around how best to manage my site's content for these different devices. With Zurb Foundation 4, you can hide or show content based on small, medium, or large device sizes. So, it seems with Zurb's approach you drop all of the content down to the device and let the CSS decide what content to show depending on device (this is responsive design).
My question is why do we have to drop all of the content to the device? That seems like a waste of processing on the server, a waste of bandwidth, a slower experience as the browser handles the content some of which may never be shown to the user because of the device they are using. Am I missing something? Wouldn't it be better to go back to the server and let it send content to the client that's appropriate for the device type? Shouldn't we be concerned about mobile user's data plans and not send down content that's not appropriate for their device type? All the examples that I've seen on responsive design has content for desktop and mobile/tablet downloaded to the client which seems to be a waste.
I'm developing a time entry application that has a different user experience based on the device type. Desktops (when in full screen) have a more detailed data entry experience whereas mobile/tablets have a different experience because of device real estate is smaller. I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate? I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.
Am I on the right track with my jQuery approach? Am I missing something regarding responsive design and needing to tailor the content to the device? Any ideas, suggestions, and guidance is appreciated. Thanks.
Mobile First with Zurb Foundation is basically a philosophy change by the Zurb team and if you want do develop a responsive site and not take a Mobile First approach then I suggest using Foundation 3 which is still available and fantastic. There is a book that I am reading that gives a great pitch for Mobile First, called Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski who is also listed as an adviser to Zurb.
here is an article by the same author that might be interesting:
http://www.netmagazine.com/interviews/luke-wroblewski-mobile-first
Basically: the premise is that you start your development and design for a mobile, meaning basically an iOS or Android style browser and then add features.
So instead of starting with a desktop / tablet experience and removing things as was commonly done with .hide classes in foundation 3 and could still be implemented in this way with foundation 4, they suggest using .show classes to add additional content.
This can be taken way further by using Compass and Sass Mixins. There isn't a lot of great documentation on how to do this, but you can basically keep your markup semantic, apply an id rather than a class and use the mixins to apply it to that id. There are advantages here in speed traversing the dom for an id vs. a class so it can be a good way to go.
Note: foundation 4 is using the drop in replacement (there are some limitations) for jQuery called Zepto. You can replace Zepto with jQuery if you really need it in foundation 4 or use foundation 3 instead. Zepto is much more lightweight and thus suited well for mobile.
As for it being faster by using jQuery to async load the data (I am assuming) based on the size of the browser, that is one way to do it. I am not sure if you are going to have a huge speed increase here. There are many strategies, pagination, async loading more data on the fly, and it depends on how you arrange the UX / UI around that data.
There are also many other issues such as caching resources, CDN, etc. that are typical in front end engineering that might give a faster load time. One resource you can check out related to this is ySlow.
There are also many design patterns such as off canvas slides, the 3 line (hamburger menu), loading more data on scroll, stateless apps, that can allow you to have the same functionality in a mobile app. If you go stateless, after the initial page load other pages should appear to be almost instantaneous.
I think the question here is more philosophical, in do you need all of the features, which is one thing that I believe taking a Mobile First approach is trying to approach.
Another thing to think about is the perceived loading time. I think I read about this is Seductive UX (another great read) but the faster you can get the page up with a loader or spinner, the faster it is perceived to be loading, even when in actuality it can be loading slower.
As a final note, if you plan on using foundation, you might look into using jQuery/Zepto with Modernizr to pull from the same media queries foundation is using. That way you don't duplicate or create something that is inconsistent with the rest of the responsiveness.
I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate?
It doesn't sound like a good approach do you take orientationChange in to account?
I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.
If you are on most tablets visiting the website in portrait and change to landscape you'll have to download the >768px UI after already downloading the <768px UI.
The mobile first approach in zb4 (with media queries) allow you to prevent stuff that belongs to big devices to be downloaded in to small devices. Basically you start with mobile styles and if the device meets the conditions you set on your mediaqueries (you can have much more breakpoints than the zf4 framework gives you by default) then the next rule jumps in.
I have worked in several 'responsive' projects even back in the pre-mediaqueries days were I use javascript to measure windowsize
Regarding javascript and like #powjames3 said zepto is much lighter / faster than jquery and if you could write your own javacript functions will be much better than using a over-bloated library.
Nowadays I do mobileFirst responsive webapps and websites use a mix of user agent sniffing ( sometimes to decide what image src or script / style src to deliver), despite the decision of the user agent tests i always serve mobile first mediaqueries, and conditionally loaded content.
"As Ethan Marcote (and John Allsopp before him), were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug."
Here are some resources that might put you in the right track:
User agent parse and detection:http://mobiledetect.net/
Tutorial http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/responsivedesign/ that covers:
Why we need to create mobile-first, responsive, adaptive experiences
How to structure HTML for an adaptive site in order to optimize performance and - prioritize flexibility
How to write CSS that defines shared styles first, builds up styles for larger screens with media queries, and uses relative units
How to write unobtrusive Javascript to conditionally load in content fragments, take advantage of touch events and geolocation
What we could do to further enhance our adaptive experience
Hope it helps
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 have an existing website running. I want this site to be able to be viewed on mobiles smart phones as well. I am ready to shave off some stuff, but would like to know how can I test this and are there any tools/guidelines on how to repurpose the site to be best viewed on mobile phones ? How to detect on the web site whether a mobile phone or a PC is hitting the site and accordingly serve the appropriate content.
There are few factors to consider such as:
- screen size
- touch vs non-touch
To detect whether the mobile phone hitting your site, you can simply verify the user agent.
There is a good article on this at A List Apart which will answer your implementation questions: Put Your Content in My Pocket
You can test by setting the user agent of your browser to that of mobile device. This can be done in safari under the develop settings, or firefox has various plugins.
And a tip, don't use anything that requires hover functionality. Touch screens don't hover.
You will find out it's a strange new world at http://mtld.mobi/
First decision you should make is which mobile platforms you want to support, then start coding...
As some one mentioned http://mtld.mobi/ is the best place to start for resources but for testing I would use http://ready.mobi that will test and debug your site and provide interface to viewing your website in mobile platforms.
First you need to decide what platforms/browsers you are going to support. If it is only smart phones like Android/Iphone/Blackberry it would be a pretty safe bet that as long as the website works in crome and isn't VERY javascript intensive and the site is catered for smaller screens it would be fine.
That is the theory in practise mobile is mobile and real world testing is the only way to go for 100% coverage.