anyone could give me a general idea how to develop a mobile website?
I did some research and I found asp.net in visual studio can make a mobile website. but is there other way of producing a mobile website.
also, when I follow the instruction of making mobile website in asp.net
I can’t find the mobile website template
Thanks
Anyone could help
harry
In a sense, there’s no such thing as a mobile website. Any normal website can be viewed on a mobile browser—even the first ever website displays well on current mobile devices. What you are really asking is how to optimize your site for mobile viewing. For that, there are many solutions, such as using a flexible layout that resizes according to the viewport size etc. There is a lot of talk about this these days and a lot you can read online. One popular keyphrase at the moment is “Responsive Design”.
Have a look at this slideshow, too, which gives an interesting perspective on designing for mobiles:
Some people provide a completely different site for mobiles, but that’s not really necessary.
Not true at all just compare the difference between browsing this forum on a mobile vs tapatalk. In many cases the goals of a user change between different devices and that is not something easily accommodated without drastically changing the design beyond what responsive design can achieve without server-side help. Anything more than a simple, small scale site warrants a devoted mobile version in my opinion. I even look at the BostonGlobe and thing to myself yeah what has been done is cool, but there is a still a lot of information on most pages due to limitations of responsive design.
There’s a big difference between a website that is compatible with mobile phones, and a mobile website.
Any decent website can be made compatible with mobile browsers, it’s just the same principles as designing for accessibility. You can then use media queries and/or mobile.css to serve appropriate styles for a small screen.
A mobile website is different. A mobile website is a different version of the website specifically designed for mobile phones. It will have some of the same content on, but it will probably only have a limited range of content, aimed squarely at people who are on the move. The layout, navigation and functionality will be different, in order to improve the experience for mobile users. Scripts and images will be minimal, to improve download speed. This kind of transformation can’t be achieved by CSS alone, because the entire page structure has to be different. I’m sure with a good CMS you could build a suitable mobile generator, but otherwise it requires maintaining two parallel sites.
Some people provide a completely different site for mobiles, but that’s not really necessary.
It depends on the site. Some websites really do benefit from a slimmed down version for mobiles, and if you’re site is big enough and gets enough mobile traffic, it would be worth considering whether it’s an appropriate course to take.
I know that people say a mobile site should be designed differently—for quick browsing on the move—but who isn’t on the move these days? The more mobile designs I see (even from my desktop) the more I like their simplicity. Where possible, I prefer to use the mobile site. I’m completely over the large canvas of desktop designs, with tons of irrelevant junk all over the page. So I’m more and more feeling that mobile is showing the way for web design in general. And I’m not the only one, I’ve recently discovered. E.g:
http://www.the-haystack.com/2011/01/07/there-is-no-mobile-web/
For me, it’s more that download and processing speeds on my mobile are usually a lot less than on my desktop. The kind of quick whizz through a website that might take 10 minutes at a PC can take half an hour or more on my mobile if it’s running the full site, because it takes that much longer to download and render each page and run scripts etc.
Giving mobiles a speedier page isn’t about speeding things up for people who are on the move, it’s about compensating for a slower browsing experience. You can also recognise that generally, when people are browsing on their phones, they probably don’t want to read lots of text; there will be a few things they home in on much more.
Sure, you may find the mobile version gives a better experience even when you’re at your PC, and if you want to use it all the time then you can do so, but it’s rare that the mobile version offers anywhere near the full functionality, so you still need the desktop site there behind it.
Excellent post. I fully agree. In addiotion, there is a lot of proprietary platforms.
Any decent website can be made compatible with mobile browsers …
Yes. Read Eric Ewe’s short article:
Six Easy ways to make your Website Mobile Friendly.
You should also be aware of jQuery Mobile.
Absolutely even if “digital newspapers” are read on iPads and similar devices. Desktop like applications may be more important on mobile platforms. More and more companies developes a mobile version of their site - often a sub site mobile.site.com. In addition a lot of companies developes apps that can be downloaded and installed on your mobile platform. These apps may be simple games, tracking software for the traditional site, and apps that give you mobile shopping at your fingertips all over the world.
If your are designing a new site, it may be profitable to start with the mobile version.
Minimalism is important.
Make it simple, as simple as possible but no simpler, and the top of laziness is to do everything correct from the beginning.
I know the widespread thinking is that a mobile site is supposed to offer something different (for reasons of speed, being on the go etc.), but I’m reading more and more that there is a new tide of thinking / experience that contradicts this. Apart from the links I posted above, this is also an interesting slideshow:
When I visited London in the summer of 2010, I noted that a lot of people read news on their iPads on the subway, most probably on their way to the job. Here in Norway, children are much more clever on these new tools than their parents.
When visiting Thailand this christmas, I got at neighbour on the hotel from Australia that had worked for Microsoft and preferred .NET over other technologies. We had a hard discussion about that and like a lot of people here in Norway, he preferred Visual Studio as a development platform. I told him that I preferred php as a server side technology and drew his attention to http://www.jcxsoftware.com/vs.php that did not interest him at all.
The point however was that there was no Internet connection on our rooms, so he bought a Thai sim card, plugged it into his iPhone that he used as a modem for his iPad to show some maps. But the connection was irritatinglys slow. We had to wait minutes for the whole map to load, so that was an ad hoc, but slow and cheap solution, since the card allowed him to surfe on his iPhone (+iPad) for one month for 200 Bat. That is at least very cheap for wireless surfing compared to Norwegian prices for the same solution.
In my opinion, we are only in the beginning of this wireless mobile wave.
I’m not so sure – at the end of the second slideshow, it talks about adapting the experience for whatever context people are in, which seems to me like they are advocating more mobile sites, not less!
One thing that they seem to be conflating is mobile and mobile phone. When I talk about a ‘mobile site’, it’s a site geared to mobile phones, and particularly in terms of the small screen and the difficulty of using such a device. They several times showed iPads suggesting that they count them as mobile devices, whereas the size and resolution of them is closer to that of a desktop than a mobile.
It took few days to complete migration of our one of the websites in iPhone version. We tested it using some iPhones with different OS versions. It was nice experience when the website had to auto-adjust when the device was held vertically or horizontally. The team completed everything. And boss expressed - I think all accesses to this website should be forwarded to this mobile version when accessed via mobile devices.
Oouch, I went to check for the mobile device browser header. And I found, hundreds of them exist. We cannot treat them all as mobile device until we are sure about it. The large number of presence can mean - there can be a lot of mobile bowser headers in the future as well. It might be difficult to know what exactly is the browser. Many of the them have different screen sizes, and some devices have specific javascripts, meta tags and other controls. Some are compatible to HTML5, some not.
Until you know the major browsers coming into your website, you can set your own standards of possible browser. Like, we did in iPhone. The concern is not a hardware, but a screen size. The wide screens like iPhone is probably compatible with many other hardwares like Android devices.
It would be definitely good to send the mobile version contents rather than the desktop version - if we find that the browser device is a mobile hardware. And you cannot really customize your website for each devices - a lot of mobile browser headers exist.
It would be definitely good to send the mobile version contents rather than the desktop version - if we find that the browser device is a mobile hardware. And you cannot really customize your website for each devices - a lot of mobile browser headers exist.
If the mobile version will not show all of the site’s content, make sure you provide a way for the mobile user to access the “normal” web version if they wish to view it that way. Some do and are cross if they can’t access it.