Do You Design For Non-Desktops/Laptops?
Last week we had an interesting discussion on what resolution you will design for in 2007 and the general consensus was that we are moving to bigger resolutions. However, with more and more devices becoming web-enabled it seems that they aren’t moving along with us. I know many of us have spent so much time waiting for the opportunity for the majority of users to move past 800×600 that it can be frustrating seeing a whole new batch start to use 640×480 again, but that is what is happening.
How do you handle these devices? You can argue for liquid designs, but in many cases if you have a 468×60 graphic ad on your site, it is not going to resize and therefore liquid design does not offer any help. What’s funny though is that these devices want to act like your everyday browser so they display websites just as any normal computer monitor would so often times you are left with scrollbars and headaches.
In this case is it the designer’s responsibility to create five different designs for 5000 different devices or do designers need a bit more help from the device makers? Maybe I’m out of touch here and there is an end-all solution for this problem and if so I’m always willing to listen.
Of course with the new iPhone and its Safari integration a whole new can of worms opens up.
Personally I was surprised how many companies “get it” and have mobile pages. Even Colorado’s Dept of Transportation does. It’s refreshing coming to a page with maybe 5 links to the relevant sections of a website. I don’t have to scroll endlessly, it fits, it’s great.
I’ve also noticed some Wordpress themes work well for mobile users. Links at the top are great. Header images as DIV backgrounds means no excessive images loaded. It’d be nice to have an online app to see what a website looks on a Blackberry, for example. With new devices, like iPhone, we’ll probably see a big shift.
By Devin on January 9, 2007 4:26 pm
I think we are almost at the point where we need to implement something like WaSP, and pressure mobile device makers to start supporting mobile CSS better.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s new phone supports the mobile type.
Outside of that, perhaps some sort of screen-zooming technology needs to be implemented by mobile browsers. I think Apple’s new phone does something like that too.
By Adrian L on January 9, 2007 5:24 pm
Paul,
You bringing this topic out today is really interesting. I’m currently in the process of getting my site/blog back up and running and that included a fresh new design for Wordpress. In the middle of the whole thing I started debating with myself on whether or not I should design a mobile version of the site.
Problem is that most of the functionality of 7andacrescent.com is built on top of Wordpress and of course, there is no mobile version of the Wordpress software. So now we not only have display issues as far as a mobile version of a website is concerned, but we also have to deal with site functionality. and I mean this in terms of devices that still use a WAP-based web browser (remember, not everyone can afford a Treo, Motorola Q, Samsung Blackjack, Blackberry Pearl, Apple iPhone). And even for those devices that do support full HTML rendering, will websites built around the functionality of Wordpress or Flash or Rails still deliver the same seamless experience that Desktop versions provide?
By Frank 'viperteq' Young on January 9, 2007 6:45 pm
[…] Over a Wisdump, Scrivs has posted an article in reference to designing for browsers outside of a desktop/laptop environmentj. A few of the comments mention something in regards to developing a design of their WordPress blog for mobile users. […]
By WordPress for Mobile Users by Vernon Kesner on January 10, 2007 12:02 am
Resolution isn’t the only problem. It’s amazing how colour can look different on different displays.
You could whip up a stylesheet for mobile devices pretty fast though. Lose the sidebar and chop any overrun on images or have no images.
But I think it makes more sense to use RSS for mobile devices instead.
By engtech on January 10, 2007 2:37 am
[…] Do You Design For Non-Desktops/Laptops? […]
By There is no default screen resolution anymore « User Experience Daily on January 10, 2007 6:43 pm
“You can argue for liquid designs, but in many cases if you have a 468×60 graphic ad on your site, it is not going to resize and therefore liquid design does not offer any help.”
Scrivs, have you used a mobile device to browse the web? They DO resize images for smaller display… you can see this with IE mobile and Opera mini. Liquid design IS the way to design for mobile; when it comes to mobile devices, you want to make everything as scalable as possible. Keep everything in one column, make it liquid, and assume the browser will handle the image sizing.
“Maybe I’m out of touch here”
It happens ;)
By Montoya on January 10, 2007 9:16 pm