The Smartest Smart Cat Owners
It is very reassuring to know many of you are smarter than your cat. I was delighted with the response after my last article’s suggestion you take advantage of sub-domain structures to arrange your mobile web site.
Many queries in similar vein were raised. Great, except they really were in the “length of string” class wanting to know more. Well, more about what?
I don’t for a minute imagine that you all want to become web designers; that, as always should be left to your web master. As I suggested in my last article it would be good to review your existing site to determine what is involved to recode it to HTML5 and CSS3.
That bit of technical jargon just describes the code standard to be used that facilitates portability to mobiles.
Those terms should be familiar to your webmaster or if not could I suggest you find one who is more up-to-date. Designing for mobile devices has its own torturous path.
Designing for the usual web browsers brought a number of challenges; these compound for mobile devices. The first problem I had was to be able to simulate a given mobile device. I keep using the term device because in addition to our smart phones we also have the various tablets. Apple started a flood which, like the real ones we are experiencing, just keeps growing. And indeed that is almost the underlying problem.
Just as oils ain’t oils so do mobile devices lack technical similarity or inter-changeability.
Much of these issues can be solved if your host provides PHP scripting facilities. If not then change your host. Another bit of jargon that should only concern your webmaster. What this does however is very desirable and technically elegant. Besides many other things it allows one to detect which device is being used to access your site. Having done so, it becomes relatively simple to direct the visitor to the most appropriate content. Importantly, it speeds up the rendition of your site. Of course, all this can be done from your web page but it does slow things down considerably.
I highlight this as many web sites are voluminous and thereby burn up a lot of bandwidth that is costly for the consumer if using a mobile. The real risk there would be losing a potential client because he could see his money disappearing whilst trying to find the information he needs on a poorly rendered site.
One of the tricky aspects at present is to determine the screen dimensions of mobile devices. Phones range from some 340 pixels to a whopping 900 pixels for Apple phones.
They resize these dimensions within the device and manipulate the output to generate some of their system features such as pinch to expand or contract screen displays. Other brands achieve similar results differently.
Mobiles in the form of tablets are here to stay and becoming incredibly powerful. Indeed we will not only have mobile phones and tablets but also “phablets”. These, dear reader, are neither of the first. They are just small tablets dressed up as large phones. Larger than the current average – if there is such a thing.
To make matters more exciting Motorola will release their latest phone called the Atrix that, like many competitors, already is as powerful as many laptops today. To make the future more interesting Google bought Motorola a few weeks ago that makes pointers to the future very obvious. Not only that but Google’s Android system released under the curious title of Ice Cream Sandwich is designed to work on any mobile device regardless of screen dimensions.
What is also significant is that Motorola with its Atrix has given the phone the facility to dock with a notebook computer. Technically that certainly raises some interesting questions but that is not for us to worry about. Let those who understand it all do the worrying, we’ll just use the gizmos.
Add to that the current batch of mobile phones we then find a whole new bunch of features. One interesting one is the ability to project whatever is on the screen onto a wall to magnify the image by a factor of five or plug into a TV and perhaps even other computers. To me these things have already become highly portable computers that almost accidentally act as telephones. So again, the design of your web site must port to a mobile device no matter what it may be and regardless what operating system it will encounter when viewed by the punter.
As I have tried to illustrate, mobile technology and its acceptance is accelerating at an incredible rate. To stay in step will be a challenge so it makes good sense to design for it now and do so wholeheartedly rather than have ongoing costs at very short intervals.
If I were to make a prediction then it would be that Apple will lose its prime market spot and more than likely be replaced by Android driven systems. Further, as material sciences advance the 11cm devices will become as small as possible; come equipped with screens that have better resolution than iPhone’s Retina display and boast more powerful graphics processing, phablets will become a major, mainstream device category.
Super-high-res screens will enable users to dispense with the horrible mobile versions of websites and instead see desktop-PC-optimised versions. Games, videos and photos will look absolutely incredible. Third-party accessory makers will create keyboards, enabling business travellers to leave their laptops and tablets at home.
As the touch-tablet and e-book categories become more popular, demand will rise for larger-screen phones. We’ll want better web browsing, better image and video viewing, better games and better e-book reading. The era of the phablet is almost here. And it’s going to be huge. All the more reason to go mobile.
Your current web site can initiate emails to your mail box. The mobile site viewed from mobile phones or tablets will be able to phone you direct or send an SMS – now how cool is that?
Video content and interactivity will become standard. That will also ensure web sites don’t cheat. Mobile video recording is old hat but it does allow the punter to post his video on a social networking site showing what your place really looks like. Ouch!
Finally if all this is too hard to arrange you can try several services that offer automatic conversion of your existing web site to suit present mobile phone formats. The catch is that your modified site will be hosted on their servers and you will be paying a monthly fee for the privilege. That may be a short term answer for some but not something you should be happy to live with. As always some offers are better than others and all are easily found on the web. But you are paying for two hosts.
So I hope I have added enough information for those of you who were kind enough to ask. Beyond that I can only offer you my services and do the work for you because this topic is just too big to cover in a general overview.
Arvo Elias
Cybercons
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