Designing for smartphones

HTML & CSS
1

i have been googling around and searching forum for the best way to make a website have a design for smartphones (no javascript for design etc etc). in essence, a much simpler version of the REAL website. my websites rely very heavily on JS and images and that is not a good idea for mobile phones

a lot of my friends ONLY browse the web on their smartphones. this drives me crazy, but i have to think about how everyone else views the web so i have to start designing for smartphones.

im kind of overloaded with information so i am starting this thread so that someone out there with heavy experience on this issue can POINT me to the best tutorial or info resource out there on the best way to approach this issue. please keep in mind i will be having some PHP backend stuff in the pages as well

i remember that when i used to visit yahoo’s site from my desktop sometimes their mobile version would load even when i was using my desktop with firefox or safari. i definitely do NOT want this to happen to my sites and i have no idea what caused that so i am paranoid and would like someone to explain or point me to the best way to do mobile phone development for web pages. thanks in advance! :slight_smile:

2

i have been googling around and searching forum for the best way to make a website have a design for smartphones (no javascript for design etc etc). in essence, a much simpler version of the REAL website. my websites rely very heavily on JS and images and that is not a good idea for mobile phones

As a smartphone user, I know for a fact that many modern smartphones support Javascript by default. I would suggest using Javascript as an enhancement instead of making your site rely on them. That’s best practice anyway. This way, any smartphone that doesn’t support Javascript, or if the user turns it off, your site will still function well. As for images, you can use CSS to scale images, so it’s fine to use images in most cases for mobile phones. Even old ones like the Nokia 7250 support images (but not Javascript), and I used to browse a fair bit with that phone. I’ve had it since 2003, along with a N95, XPressMusic 5800 and a HTC Desire HD since then, amongst others and I’ve never found an issue with images when browsing the net.

If you’re interested, this book might be helpful for you:
Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps

3

I recommend you take a look at this slideshow:

It’s been discussed a bit in the forums recently:

4

ummm… aren’t i supposed to have a separate stylesheet for mobile phones? or is that the old method to go about it?

thanks for all the resources and i will plow into it this weekend! :slight_smile:

5

You can try to target mobile devices with the handheld media type, but few devices seem to recognize it anyway. So a different strategy is required.

6

I’m loving this slideshow, and I was recently wondering about this topic myself. Excellent :smiley:

7

i agree. thanks for providing excellent content :slight_smile: