Web Design and Graphics

The number of users browsing the Web from a mobile device continues to rise, yet most mobile web sites are still sub-par.

The thing is, creating a great web experience for users of mobile devices is much easier than you might think. In this article I’ll introduce seven fundamental steps that, if followed, will help you avoid the pitfalls that have caused many other mobile sites to fail. By the end of this article you’ll know exactly where to focus your efforts in order to build a successful mobile site.

1. Don’t Mix Up Your Markup

A few different types of markup are available for building a mobile web site. You’ll need to choose one that suits the needs of your customers and stick with it.

WML

In the early days of mobile web devices, the only way to surf the mobile web was to browse WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) sites. A WAP site uses WML (Wireless Markup Language) as its primary markup language. WML is an XML markup language based on the card-and-deck metaphor.

Luckily for us, WML has since been superseded by several other technologies — in fact, if you’re just getting into the mobile web game, you can probably ignore WML entirely. WML is mostly used by legacy systems or by sites that explicitly target customers with low-end phones that are six years old or older.

One potential group of customers still using WML browsers, however, is those in developing nations. TheNokia 1100 and 1101, for example, are extremely basic, extremely cheap phones, of which an estimated 200 million units have been solid worldwide, making this phone the best-selling model to date, worldwide. If your site is targeted to this market segment, WML might be the best solution for you.

XHTML

For most sites, we can ignore WML and make use of a markup language with which you’re probably much more familiar — XHTML.

Most built-in phone browsers these days can handle XHTML just fine. A mobile phone recognizes two flavors of HTML:

1. XHTML — the same, basic XHTML rendered by desktop web browsers




2. XHTML-MP — the MP here stands for Mobile Profile

The difference between these two languages is that XHTML-MP consists of slightly fewer elements and tighter restrictions. These differences exist to make it easier for the mobile device to parse and render a web document, but writing XHTML-MP markup shouldn’t introduce any significant changes to your process for writing regular XHTML.

Anecdotally, when my team and I develop mobile web sites we usually use regular XHTML, and this approach has served us just fine.

2. Know Your Phones

As plasma and HD TVs slowly hit the market, broadcasters have run into the problem of where to place their logo and news tickers. Previously, they knew that all TVs were the same 3×2 dimensions, so they knew the relative width of the screen. Now, they’re beginning to feel the pain of dealing with a wide assortment of TV resolutions and dimensions — an issue that web developers deal with on a daily basis.

Of course, the mobile world is even worse! Not only must we cater for different screen sizes and resolutions, but also different shapes, as Figure 1 illustrates. From rectangles that are short and long, to those that are tall and skinny, to perfect squares, the mobile world contains a rich tapestry of variation that almost makes you want to pull your hair out!

If you consider the most common phones available, they can be categorized on the basis of screen size — give or take a few pixels:

• 128 x 160 pixels
• 176 x 220 pixels
• 240 x 320 pixels
• 320 x 480 pixels

Knowing these screen dimensions helps you optimize some of your content, however it’s best to keep the shape and style of your site as minimal and linear as possible. There is no mouse on a mobile phone — only an up-down feature — so you can’t demand that users jump around the page.

iPhone/Internet-tablet versus old green-screen phones

There are a couple of exceptions to the norm in the mobile phone market. They are the really high-end devices like the iPhone or the Nokia Internet Tablet, and the very basic, old “green-screen” monochrome dot matrix devices such as the Nokia 3310,

Low-end mobile phones have several limitations, including screen resolution and a severely limited ability to render XHTML documents. As I mentioned in the previous section, if a majority of your customers fall in this group, then maybe WML is still for you.

At the other end of the spectrum, high-end devices often have the ability to run a web browser that’s comparable to one you might use on a desktop machine. Delivering a quality user experience to these devices can be tricky — while the device may be perfectly capable of rendering a full, traditional web page design, it’s probably transmitting data over a cellular network, which is much slower than standard broadband Internet speeds. So even though the device can handle a normal web site, the customer’s situation and the reason why they’re requesting your services may mean that sending them the normal version of your web site isn’t the best solution.

We’ll see in the next section what this means for the design of your mobile site.

3. Target the Right Customers

The goal for any web site should be to know your customers in order to deliver to them the most appropriate content.

This goal is even more important with mobile sites — not only do you need to know your customers, but you need to know what they are likely to be doing on your mobile site, as well as where they’ll be when they’re doing it. Traditional web site customers are most likely sitting at a desk facing a large monitor that has a decent resolution. Visitors who are browsing your mobile site are unlikely to be in the same circumstances — they might be waiting in line, riding on the train or the bus, running to the departure gate, or lost in an unfamiliar town late at night and trying to get somewhere.

Google is one company that has invested considerable effort into streamlining its web applications to suit mobile users. The web developers at Google have identified and focused on three main groups, and they attempt to target their applications to those customers’ needs. These are three solid categories, and are worth examining for your own mobile site. Let’s look at them now. Buy mobile phone with payday advance

Tutorial on Designing for 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024 and higher

Designing web sites to fit all resolutions is a very important web design principle. Try out the Entheos site in all resolutions higher than 800 x 600 and you will find that it is designed to fit the page exactly. Therefore, visitors who have higher resolution can see more content in one page which reduces scrolling. Most web sites are designed for only one resolution. They may look perfect in a 800 x 600 resolution but if viewed in a 1024 x 768 resolution look a little empty. You’ll find a lot of wasted space around it making the web site look quite small.

From our research we have found that majority of our viewers are on the 1024×768 resolutions and higher. As time goes by more and more people are going to switch to higher resolutions as seen by our site statistics. It is therefore very important to design web sites for all resolutions. That is one of the principles we follow while designing web sites for our clients. With that bit of background information, lets get started on how to design a web site for all screen resolutions.

Step 1: Decide on the lowest Screen Resolution

Before you start you need to decide on your lowest screen resolution. Your web site will have to be designed keeping the lowest resolution in mind. Through our research we have found that less than 0.5% are on the 640 x 480 resolution So we ignore that completely. The next important resolution is the 800 x 600 resolution. Some of our visitors are on this resolution so we use this as our lowest screen resolution. This means that our web site has to fit all resolutions equal to or higher than 800 x 600.

Step 2: Design Your Web Site On This Resolution

Once you decide on your lowest screen resolution you need to design your web site for that resolution This means that all your graphics will be designed for this resolution. Design your web site and export the images as you would normally do.

Step 3: While converting your design to HTML make sure all your tables are measured in terms of percentages

Important: This is the trick to developing web sites for all resolutions. You need to work in terms of percentages and not pixels. If you work in pixels you are giving an absolute measurement to a table, whereas working in percentages gives a relative measurement. The table will be a given percentage of the screen resolution.

I hope you have understood this clearly. I’d like to explain this with an example. If you were to design a site for a 800 x 600 resolution, you would probably make a table with width 800 px and height 600 px. Now if you were to design a web site for all resolutions you need to make a table with width and height 100%, so that whatever the screen resolution may be the web page will scale to fit the page. It will be 100% of the screen resolution or whatever percentage you choose to give it.

The first step is to make a table with 100% height and 100% width. You could make it 95% if you want some white space around it.

Step 4: Insert images and content

Once you have designed your tables in terms of percentages you need to insert your images and content. The usual layouts will probably have a logo which can come on the top left corner and your navigation buttons in the top right or left navigation bar.

For more complex layouts you will need to use background fills to design your web sites. Remember since you are designing web sites to fit all resolutions you need to position your images accordingly (for your header). The easiest principle I follow (if possible) is to use the top left and right corners for fixed images and let the middle tile according to the size of the page.

Step 5: Test your site in all the resolutions

The last step is to test your site in all the resolutions that are available on your computer. To do this you need to:

1. Right click on your Desktop and click on Properties
2. Click on the tab Settings
3. Under Desktop area click shift the scale to 800 x 600, 1024×768 or higher if possible
4. Once you have chosen the resolution you want to check the site in, click on the Test button
5. If you can see the bitmap clearly you can click on Apply

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Here are some essential web design tips that every web site should follow. Design your web site by following these tips and I guarantee that visitors will have a great first impression of your site.

1. Fast Loading web site designs - This is the number 1 tip that every web designer should follow. You might design a web site that looks fantastic but few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load. Your designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load. Remember, you might have a great design but very few people are going to see it if it takes a long time to load.
2. Clear Navigation - Once a visitor has come to your site you need to make them go through your site. To do this you need to have clear navigation. Make sure all your important links are at prominent places. Preferably right on top – that’s usually where a visitor first looks. Make use of menus on the right and the left. Try to link to as many pages of your site. Let your information be accessible from all parts of the site. You never know what a visitor may be interested in. Try to also use the footer for your important links.
3. All Resolutions - Today, there are computers with all kinds of resolution. They range from 640 x 480 to 1024 x 768 and go even higher. Your job is to design your site for all these resolutions. The best way to do this is to design your site in terms of percentage and not pixels.
4. Browser Compatibility - Make sure your site is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in Netscape as well as in Internet Explorer. Don’t stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE. Usually Netscape gives some problems, especially when you try doing complicated HTML designs. But don’t give up too soon, usually with patience these problems can be easily fixed.
5. Readable and professional looking fonts - Don’t ask me how many times I’ve clicked out of a site just because the font is in Comic Sans and the color is a bright pink or green. Just by looking at the font you feel that the site is not a professional site. Don’t use Comic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers. If the font you use is not available in a visitors computer the web site will use the default font of your computer which is much worse. So try to keep to common and professional web fonts. The fonts that I always stick to are Arial and Verdana.
6. Minimize the use of images - I believe that sometimes simple designs are the most effective for the web. Keep your site simple but neat. Don’t clutter your page with big, bulky images that take ages to load. Instead use tables creatively and design eye – catching icons that will draw a visitor’s attention to a particular section of your site. Tip – Visitors are usually more interested in content than in design.
7. Use of white space - Try not to clutter up your page with too many images, backgrounds and colorful fonts. Again use the Keep It Simple principle by minimizing the use of graphics and using a lot of white space. White space gives a sense of spaciousness and overall neatness to a site. Notice the white space in our site.
8. Check for broken links - Always check for broken links within a site before uploading it to your web server. In Dreamweaver you can check for broken links by right clicking on any file in the Site Files Window and then clicking on Check links – Entire Site. If you don’t have this facility you need to upload your site and then check it using online tools like Net Mechanic.