Mobile friendly sites look good, should they be device specific?
Since we’ve already highlighted one tech site’s new functionality, why not keep the trend rolling with another? Steve Paine’s UMPC Portal caught my "i", that is, my iPhone by surprise this morning. See, I have the bad habit of waking up but not getting out of bed. Nope, I reach over to the nightstand and power up my iPhone which always gets about 30 seconds more sleep than I do. Since I’m warm, cozy and comfy, I tend to surf through RSS feeds and hit websites before my feet actually hit the floor.
So today I went to UMPC Portal and saw how nicely it now renders on the iPhone. Looks like Steve implemented a plug-in for WordPress that works well on an iPhone or iPod Touch. The story titles appear along with the date and the number of comments found for each story. A tap will expand the post so you can read the first few lines (shown), while a tap on the title shows the whole post. All in all, a very nice look.
This gets us back to the original question posed when the iPhone arrived. How do you feel about websites formatted for a specific device? Normally, I’m not a fan, but you can’t argue with great look and feel of examples like this. I suppose you try to implement a different plug-in for different mobile platforms and browsers, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a mobile standard that looks good on all devices?
I believe they should just have a standard already formatted for all mobile phones. I will try Chippys site on Opera 9.5 when I get home to see how that renders and hopefully it will be the same (or remotely).
Good to know its working OK. One of the readers suggested the plugin and as it was a 2 minute job it seemed silly not to do it.
Interesting thing is the stats…
Twice as many page views, an increase in customer loyalty and an increase in visitors for the iphone screen size.
Leads me to believe that people still prefer mobile sites even with the best MID browser in the world.
Steve. From a campsite in Freudenburg. Living on the EDGE!
The last mobile web standard I recall was WAP, and we knew how dismal that was. Perhaps popular blog platforms should release mobile theme plugins to cater for various MIDs.
On a related note, I recently did a videocast demonstrating the three WordPress plug-ins that take advantage of the iPhone interface, viewable here: http://theory.isthereason.com/?p=2274
with any standard, you’ll find variants. in my opinion standards should simply define a set of minimum requirements that must be met so that everyone regardless of device type can make use of the application. if you have a device such as the iPhone which can offer a cleaner user experience because of screen size, touch pad, etc. then why limit the application design because someone may not have an iPhone?
the problem is basically this: bitmap images and fixed sized tables.
if one have any of these, the page cant reflow without a lot of cpu power under the hood.
and mobile devices generally dont have that, as they have to give priority to battery life.
and thats when you get proxy browsers like opera mini.
iphone specific pages are an abomination as they are designed to look good only on a set display size.
sadly they are easy to make as apple made available templates for just such a reason.
there was a reason why java only supported one mouse button and a limited set of other inputs. sun basically boiled it down to the lowest common denominator.
funny thing is that stuff like mouseover and other ticks that make ajaxy pages so fun to use on a laptop or desktop falls flat ones one use a touchscreen that cant tell the diff between moving and clicking.
one should really grasp the old design proverb, its not what you can add, but what you can take away…
I’m all for it, when it’s a layout fix without the usual crap that you lose from mobile-optimized sites. Something simple like assuming no better than a 320px-wide display isn’t bad, but when you trim back on features and information, that’s when I lose interest, since I’m just going to move to a full desktop/laptop OS to finish up my reading.
Many of the mobile sites I frequent offer, more or less, the same content as their desktop browser brethern but without all the images and advertising. And that works for me. In fact, there are a few mobile sites I use from the desktop because of that difference.
I think it’s a horrible idea. We should have standards. We don’t want the whole IE experience again that we went through on desktops. Digg.com just introduced their mobile site m.digg.com and when I visit from my new Curve, it looks horrible. It forces me now to install Opera Mini because I have no other option if more sites follow this. The unfortunate thing is many sites are all iphone/safari specific now. Many people are not going to buy an iphone, we still use other brands. If it wasn’t acceptable in the IE days, it should not be acceptable now. Browsers will get better, but we are still waiting for that day.
If the alternate formatting is only displayed for users of that specific device, does it really matter to those of us who don’t have that device?
I would say no – if someone wants to create a version of their mobile site with an iPhone look and feel, go nuts. Just show me the un-iPhoned version when I visit on my BlackBerry.
iPhone users – how much do you appreciate iPhone-specific mobile sites? Is it really important that a mobile site looks iPhoney, like the UMPC site in the article? Or is it enough that a site is formatted for a small screen?
That’s a question I’ve struggled with lately when building mobile websites – is it worth taking the time to create an iPhone “skin” in addition to a plain mobile view?
It would be nice if there was a mobile display markup language. It would be possible to build something that each browser could interpret differently but display the same content. Something that would share a lot of principles of XML. Have the content stored as objects, and then have each device display it in its native browser.
@Toby I agree. Make the mobile site standard for all mobile users, then make a specific iphone standard if you want to. Not the other way around. This is turning into a IE bs situation all over again.