Slashdot Mirror
New Tools Help Create Cellphone-Friendly Web Sites
David Kesmodel from WSJ writes "New low-cost tools are making it easier for companies to register and build Web sites designed for cellphones, the Wall Street Journal reports. Domain-name registrars such as GoDaddy and Network Solutions are starting to roll out all-inclusive packages to target the mobile Web. And mobile-content specialists such as the U.K.'s Bango Ltd. offer their own mobile kits that help companies set up a basic mobile Web presence. Even so, the wireless Internet is still a long way from attracting a critical mass of users."
...to be broadsided by someone surfing the web while heshe is driving
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
The value of concise plain text. Maybe they'll patent the CSS for "plain text" before the end of the year.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
to make simple text websites?
So they re-discover a basic fundamental principle of web design.
Maybe nobody has used this page? Or better yet this one?
If I'm out and about and need to look something up on the web I no longer try and use my mobo... call me lazy if you want, but I ring someone up who is most likely sat in front of a machine and kindly as them to do it for me. I don't know if it's me, my eyesight or what (ok, enough of the porn gags) but I just find it really hard to anything useful on such a small screen. Particularly as I usually carry a tablet and can usually find a wireless network. Surfing the net on my phone is a neat idea, I just can't see anyone using it a great deal. Am I alone here?
There is no need to create a different website for mobile devices. Go look at the latest Nokia phones (or the Apple iPhone). Their KHTML-based browser can show me most websites just like they appear on my desktop, and it's not difficult to navigate them even with the smaller screen. With 3G, surfing is finally fast enough to be actually usable.
Now, considering mobile technology most likely only keeps getting better, creating separate "mobile" websites seems like a waste of time and money.
"Can you parse me, now?"
I abandoned cell phones a few years back and have been using smartphones ever since. Despite obvious formatting issues, regular websites on a Windows Mobile or Palm OS device are a much better alternative. I used to try getting directions, phone numbers, weather, etc. on my cell phone using whatever WAP sites I could find. Over 90% of them were junk, unnavigable, or unworkable. Google lets you send an SMS to them to get information and that helped, but it still wasn't enough. It's 2007 and major commercial websites oftentimes STILL don't have a WAP version of their site. I guess since they can't stick enough banner ads on a WAP page they don't want to make it available... At least there are enough smartphone/PDA alternatives out there, but good luck to all you cell phone users.
It's not tools that make mobile telephone-based internet apps. succeed, it's the cost of your plan, and the quality / utility of the app. Here in Europe, we've have 2.5G, 3G and EDGE for a while - the biggest usage of mobiles, aprt from calling, is still SMS messages. WAP was a massive failure here - too slow, expensive and no perceived value. I-mode was a huge success in Japan - cheap, fast and loads of content. I finally got a decent data plan here in France with my new Blackberry Pearl. So, I can download and use Google maps on the Pearl. It works really well and...I've only used it twice. The e-mail, on the other hand... But that's not a 'web' app.
The success story that the article talks about is about getting one lead a day only. If 5% of these convert into visitors who actually come and stay at the inn, that's 1 or 2 new visitors per month. Unlikely to be worth any trouble with the website. The inn owner would have been better off spending that money on Google AdWords. He's effectively attracting callers with what must be tens of dollars per call cost. If that's the success story, what's the typical outcome?
-- Stanislav Shalunov
...because it's so much better than using the computer I'm sitting next to.
You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!
Wouldn't it make *much* more sense to standardize on mobi.domain.tld? I don't see any reason for a separate tld for this, other than to make registrars money?
-1 Spam.
...is spotty.
Google Maps is slick. I get traffic, directions and maps for locations, and not too slow. Just not intuitive enough.
SMS to googl (46645) and I get pretty good results. Especially for business phone numbers and the address to Fry's Electronics...
www.google.com is tolerable. Usually about 15 seconds to render the results.
And BerryBlogs is the cat's ass. It just plain works, RSS means never having to wait 7 minutes (yes, SEVEN minutes) for an Infoworld page to render to the point that it tells you it can't render...
But slicker yet is MIDPSSH. SSH'ing into server to run rules du jour, yum update, or just to run spam learning scripts from my BlackBerry - priceless. Especially behind the firewall. It's dog slow, but faster than skipping out to a WiFi spot, and a lot faster than waiting until I get home...
Now, I have a WAP deck on my web server just to give me some shortcuts for obvious things. And WAP is about as dumb as a blade of grass. If you can wangle CSS, you can code WAP in your sleep. Get a WAP emulator for your PC to test.
I'd like lighter-weight pages for a lot of stuff, and to have them sense my browser type and give it to me hard and fast, but I'm not hopeful. Many sites want to give me Flash. Which ain't on MY 7105T, and I don't care if it ever is.
And last but not least, some sites are using Sqweezer. Very nice, and Wired, I thank you!
-rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Steps for creating a phone-friendly website:
1) Use well-written, flexible html to suggest general formatting. Do not attempt pixel-precise layout.
2) Do not rely on ecmascript, flash, css, or any other superfluous nonsense. If you do choose to add such boondoggles to your site, make sure that things function properly without them.
3) Keep in mind that not all clients will display all attributes in the same way. "Strong" may not always mean bold, meanginful alt tags should be used for clients that don't display images, and so on.
You may notice that these are the same steps that are required for creating any civilized website. If you've done things right in the first place, you should not need to know or care whether your clients are 30" displays, text readers, cellphones, search engines, or whatever new context will be popular next year.
i love opera mini. i have the internet in my pocket for a reasonable price. :)
Did anyone spot the strange link to a trailer for Wheels the Movie in that WSJ article? The trailer looks like a very clever parody, but how did it get in there?
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
The problem with mobile devices and the web is there's no uniformity. Even the aspect ratio's are different between devices.
Only made cornier by the Gauntlet Zonk-mment. But yes, I like my sites to work on a cell phone. "Look Good" is kindofa misnomer. And most of my cell-surfing is done while I'm in Japan, so everything is more fun on those phones. Haven't clicked the link, but I've been using Opera and Nokia preview tools for a while now... jst txt it bby. <3 u!
This is like helping a spammer to get his email program up and running. Coming from GoDaddy it doesn't surprise me. And why are we giving them the time of day?
What?
Why don't we make cell phones fit to display websites as they are?
I would just use opera mini that even has a RSS feed reader, thus I am in bed now and posting this from my mobile. My gmail and internet banking and the whole web in my hand in bed for a couple of cents. You can do most anything you can do from desktop. Testmy.net returns a speed of 384kbps and I can see peacefire.org just fine thank you. And u wanna know the best part: i'm in south africa. So why waste time and money with all the lame solutions I've seen posted so far? Just my 0.02...
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
I don't need no damn graphics hogging up my connection, which is limited to a measly 5GB / month. WAP should be enough for anybody!
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
speaking as someone who's on a phone right now; are there any tabbed browsers in java? opera mini rocks in every other way...
also, vnc clients?
On this topic, Google attempt to convert all the bloated web pages out there into lightweight HTML, when you search via your mobile. This was quite handy... although it was probably over conservative in splitting pages up, so you constantly had to click to new pages.
Unfortunately, this functionality stopped working a while back - even the feature to "show me the real HTML" - instead it just shows one tiny fraction of the page with various broken links. As a result Google search is now totally useless on my mobile (Nokia 6234), and I had to go use MSN (even though the results aren't quite as good).
Anyone know anything more about this?
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
readers who actually can engage in a social relationship.
I'd show a picture, but fear my Karma hording would have someone hack my website... 0'8
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
the NPG electrode was replaced with carbon blac
and they want their web design back.... at least thats what mobile web feels like right now. I don't think it's so much a problem of design as it is in the support included in most mobile browsers. That being said I have yet to use Opera Mini... damn Verizon and their BREW lockins.
It's nice to hear all of you point out "standards" based design but until bandwidth and (mostly bandwidth) hardware improves many mobile devices/broswers will only support a subset of features. That and the major cell companies have a vested interest in not making the mobile web "too" compelling lest it eat into their other paid services and/or compromises their networks with excessive bandwidth usage. Like it or not the cell companies are a monopoly and their networks are their strictly to extract the most amount of money legally possible from their customers. But then this is a whole differant discussion.....