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Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet?
aws910 writes "Reuters is running an article on how flashy web design is impacting the usability of internet-enabled mobile devices, with quotes from Tim Berners-Lee. Although the article is sparse on details, it is an interesting topic for discussion. Having recently bought an internet-enabled cellphone, I can honestly say that most websites are painful to view on a 240x320 screen over a GPRS connection(EVDO is expensive/US-only). Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"
Is there that big of a market for mobile internet to have sites double design, one for PCs, one for 320x240 mobile internet devices? I know very few people that use things like that. Usually to check weather and the sports scores.
"I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection." -- Sigmund Freud
Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"
I don't see this as really being a problem. People don't really browse the internet with handheld devices (phones, PDAs, etc) actually attempting to REPLACE their computer. People only want to be able to check their stocks or recent headlines. When the content you want to look at is just a dozen lines of text, a PDA is more than adequate. If you want to browse a page that is designed for 1600x1200 resolutions, chances are that the page ISN'T something you need to check right away, and can wait until you get to your computer.
I just wrote a text only portal to the information I need using Nokia's Python SDK for Symbian 60.
:)
It screen scrapes the sites I'm interested in and just returns the stuff I *want* to know : local cinema showings, a few RSS feeds, my current bank balance - that sort of stuff
More work than most people will do but makes me happy
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Web designers should have been worrying about 56k speeds all along. Not everybody happens to have broadband yet, and even if they do, why should you bleed it all away with huge flash files, etc. If you have to add splash and flash, perhaps your message isn't as good as it could be.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I also just bought an internet-friendly cell phone (Treo 650), and I'm figuring out which sites want me to visit them while I'm on the run (Google and Southwest airlines, to name two off the top of my head) and those that don't (weather.com).
Either produce a mobile-friendly version of your site - which shouln't be the end of the world, considering that most major sites these days are run by content management systems, or let the viewers go to your competitors. Automatic browser detection would be nice, but I can handle typing "mobile" or whatever instead of "www".
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How about when you don't have one available? Waiting for a flight, sitting on the subway or whatever?
So until businesses are punished for their lack of interoperability with mobile devices, this will always be the case.
And it's unlike they'll ever be punished because device manufacturers have the onus to interoperate with bad sites, not vice versa.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
IMO, broswing website using some silly little contraption is silly. Just view the sites on a regualr computer when it's more convenient. Or, every web designer should use CSS and have a handheld-friendly CSS option.
Or webdesigners can take the time to make websites that have slimmed down versions (text only Google News, Slashdot's lite (or completely customizable version, various sites that offer WAP detection).
I have a little utility that I wrote for geocachers to convert words to numbers via the "dollar word method". A guy I know complained that it wouldn't render on his WAP phone. I spent the 10 minutes using Google to figure out how to write it to work w/WAP and how to get Apache to detect WAP and rewrite the URLs.
Is it really that hard to do? Do we really need Flash and 100k page loads for a simple website?
No, we don't and it's not silly when you are sitting on the bus or train or in the mall waiting for your SO to shop.
Be serious.
Pulling down all of these websites on a Palm or PocketPC is very painful - my Treo 650 would take *forever* to load image-heavy Engadget, for instance. RSS is the perfect solution for the handheld. It allows you to quickly get a list of topics (text only, which is perfect for small screens) and then only load those pieces that interest you.
RSS is nice on the desktop. RSS is invaluable on the handheld.
Now if only a decent method of synchronizing multiple RSS clients could be developed (Bloglines doesn't cut it).
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
It seems plausible to think that the market forces will overpower (or otherwise direct) those of technology in this instance.
For example, do you think that Amazon will move to a simpler website design to accomodate relatively few mobile users? Or would they go to the trouble to create an alternate 'mobile-only' website?
The answer?
Yes, if the market demands for such a headache merit doing so.
Otherwise, I think the technology of mobile Internet will have to conform to the current market situation of flashy website designs.
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
I can't believe a dozen comments have been posted all to the effect of "don't look at the net w/ handheld - flashy is good",
... maybe ... but how about just dishing up information?
Well, flashy sucks on handhelds or on a real computer. I almost feel like I'm back on a modem when I visit some sites which feel the need to pull their flashy ads of some distant server and won't display squat till that happens. Or sites that are FLASH only - sure it's neat once
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Swiss Army knife.. I can see specialized sites, news, weather and, I suppose, sports scores, offering separate pages optimized for phones, but it's silly, IMO, to think that the majority of sites are going to do this. I'm certainly not planning on doing that with the sites I'm responsible for.
Once again it's the old concept that I want my cell phone to be.....(gasp) just a phone and a good one. I don't need it to be a digital camera, or a can opener.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
If you stick to the standards you can easily make good looking sites that can scale any screen and browser.
Gimme some of that sweet, sweet crack.
Actually, the biggest reason SMS is so popular is cost. In most of Europe and Asia, the cost of a text message is a fraction of the per-minute charge for a voice call.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
The do what the cavemen did while they were waiting for their flights - sit down and shut up.
Contrary to popular belief, you don't need to have a cellphone shoved into your ear, or a web browser in your face 24/7.
umm.. Useless it is not. Usage of wireless web enabled devices is growing faster than the conventional delivery methods can handle.
As a full time web designer - I have made my services for developing websites for web enabled devices a high priority. With proper research and proper web design skills, developing websites for slow connections without Macromedia Flush is pretty straight forward.
What is really needed right now, especially for the Pocket PC platform (Which I feel is superior in every aspect compared to the kludge that is Palm OS)is Minimo development to progress at a faster rate. PPC IE browser is blech, and the only viable option for efficiency on the PPC platform right now is NetFront v3.1 for Pocket PC. Multimedia delivery via PPC Windows Media Player or Real Player is already in place and developing content for that format is pretty straight forward.
I only wish Qualcomm would get off its dead ass and develop Eudora for PPC instead of just Palm OS. I don't like the idea of using Outlook, but I will if it is necessary to do my work.
<horse type="hobby">
The WWW is also useless on a real PC if you actually try to use the resolutions the PC is capable of. For instance my current PC/monitor combination can handle 2048x1536 resolution.
I tried that just the other day, and >90% of sites were just unusable, even if you increase the font size.
Then again, >90% is way better than the OS (MacOSX) and my actual applications which was 100% unusable...
Apple is just sitting on this revolutionary resolution independent windowing system, and they just won't let me use it as intended.
For gods sake, I just want 300 dpi monitor resolution, is that too much to as for? Especially from the company that popularized WYSIWYG?
</horse>I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Either way, you might want to consider that a good portion of potential viewers will go somewhere else if the word "Flash" appears in the first 30 seconds, or nothing at all appears in the first minute.(You can always have a link to the "Alternative, pointless, bandwidth intensive and painfully slow graphics version").
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
the topic is
sparse on det-
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it needs to
fit into a mo-
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sulli
RTFJ.
The problem with alternate versions is cost. You're required to maintain a separate codebase for your slimmed down version, and you need to have enough potential earnings for that codebase for it to become feasible. Unless a considerable chunk of your clients for the regular version demand a trimmed down version or they will move to a competitor, there is no business case for supporting alternate platforms right now, due to low usage numbers.
Ofcourse, over time the use of the web on handheld platforms will become widespread enough for there to be a business case for supporting them, but as always, there is a case of chicken and egg.
Look at the history of CSS on the web. Tons of benefits, but as long as the vast majority wasn't using a CSS-supporting browser, there were few CSS-based sites, and most browser makers dragged their feet to implement a sprawling standard nobody used.
Also, I understand that there are a lot of slashdot users here who dismiss "flashy" websites, but make no mistake, flashiness is a feature that sells. Ofcourse, all flash and no function leaves you biting the dust. But if you have feature parity with your competitors and your competitors have a more attractive product, you will lose marketshare.
Actually, a CSS redesign of Slashdot has been offered, although there would be lots of heavy lifting to get it into slashcode. This part 2 of an article on /. redesign shows how /. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.
(Part 1)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Yes, good idea, because as everyone knows, web designers have all the time in the world to design a bunch of different versions of a single site, and of course, their employers & clients are always willing to pay to develop all that for a ridiculously small percentage of people hitting the site with a cellphone.
It'll be nice if, one day, people realize the vast majority of professional website designers have very little say-so in what goes online. "Design it this way."
Gah.
With all of the RTFM and RTFA retorts around here, I think the best solution to a boring wait is to RTF whatever. Better still, read a book.
Are we getting so wired that we can't just sit still with a bound book and read for half an hour?
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
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For every karma whore there are four more people with mod points to kill.
Well, if your site clearly seperates its data from its presentation (come on, CSS isn't a new technology now), it would be incredibly easy to just fashion up a new barebones stylesheet. If it's difficult, then your design is broken and you should have written it correctly from the beginning.
Sorry to be harsh, but it's 2005 now. These concepts aren't new, and it shouldn't be difficult to make a bare-bones view of the same site after you've designed for that all-important client.
I run the website for a local company, and creating a plain-text stylesheet with basic colors and lines would take me all of 15 minutes.
Frankly speaking dude, a person who calls themselves a "web developer" and is making 283K homepages is part of the problem. That's bigger than CNN's.
Badmouthing people for your inability to control your page bloat, just shows that your maturity as a developer is lacking in more areas than just efficiency.
And contrary to popular belief, there is nothing wrong with having 24/7 access to tremendous volumes of information. You can do research on just about any subject from just about anywhere. That is an amazing gift that technology has given us. Just because it is different than the way it used to be done, doesn't make it bad.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
" The problem with alternate versions is cost."
Cost is a double edged sword when you are looking at future business models. In the past 6 months, my company has been visited by big-wigs from every major wireless provider in the US desperatly seeking the killer app that will increase wireless airtime usage.
Yet, even today, I still can't whip out my mobile and easily check weather, news, or plan a trip (to include reserving tickets). All of things could be done 3 years ago in Japan. And this time it wasn't due to any magical Japanese techno glory. It was simply just that the mobile providers partnered with content providers to make the phones tools that could be used for every aspect of life.
As long as we are stuck with this crappy SMS messaging (seriously, how hard is it to have full email to a phone...it's just data), and no content to make the web browser in my phone anything more than an amusement that get's old in 5 minutes, product cycles are going to stay rediculously slow and we will remain two to three years behind Japan and Europe.
Simply put, for the younger crowd, the cell phone has got to become a status symbol due to cool features (we're starting to get there), and for the older crowd, it has got to be a tool that goes beyond just being able to make a phone call away from home. Once the carriers satisfy both of these markets, we will start to see a consumer drive to have the latest features which will in turn push competition in handset design.
The phone providers don't need a new killer app, they just need some basic organized content worth looking at.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
Opera scales both text & images (even Flash) through its unique Zoom function.
;)
It's also the best browser out there anyway. And if you're too cheap to pay a few $$ to use the web the way you want when you've coughed up $hundreds on a monitor, quit complaining.
"Print is dead" - Egon
It's not the medium, it's the content.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.