The iPhone brings in a sense of sheer swiftness during web browsing and phone navigation. The video clearly demonstrates how the iPhone can flip and expand Web pages. It speedily displays the Web page at a glance or zooms in to make the text entirely suited to your interests. In one sense, since the iPhone uses Safari, Web designers shouldn't have to do anything special to create a Web page that will work on the iPhone.
But the essence here is to get your page to be as vibrant as possible with the use of extensive graphics!
While approaching such a task, it becomes necessary to define your target audience and their expectations. The best sites take into account the type of device the page is being viewed on, including the resolution, color options, and available functions.
General Guidelines for Building a Site for iPhones
Test on as many devices as you can
Demonstrate the appearance of the web page appearance on an iPhone. While there are some emulators out there, they really don't give you the same feel as trying to navigate through a Web site on the tiny little screen.
Make your pages degrade gracefully.
While writing for Flash-enabled, wide screen browsers, it is vital to showcase all critical information to a small screen that can't handle any special features (like cookies, Ajax, Flash, JavaScript, etc.). Anything beyond XHTML Basic will be beyond some cell phones.
Build a wireless specific page - and make it easy to find
Each specific page for your cell phone and wireless customers must be well marketed and made available. In order to gain traffic, put the link to the wireless page at the top of your document, and then, hide that link from non-handheld devices using the handheld media type. After all, most of the cell-phone users would visit your wireless page. So in order to keep visitors glued to your page ensure you have a wireless link.
Web Page Layout for iPhones
Writing pages for the iPhone market has a great advantage in that you don't have to make any changes if you don't want to. Another beneficial aspect lies in the iPhone used Safari wherein the quality of your page on a cell phone is doubled in comparison to a computer. Here are a few points to help you make browsing for customers more efficient:
• Remember that the screen is tiny. The iPhone will compress all columns down into the tiny window, and this can make them very hard to read without zooming. Most iPhone users are familiar with zooming although reading a page in one standard way is more preferable.
• Divide pages into smaller chunks. Always separate your pages to be content specific in order to avoid boredom for users.
Links and Navigation on iPhones
• The shorter the URLs are, the better. In order to make customers comfortable and less-irritated with page browsing, keeping a short URL is the key.
• But long link text is easier to tap. During web page browsing or reading, users come across a host of link texts. However on a cell phone it becomes difficult to coick on the desired link. Hence, keeping a link of 4-5 words helps the user reach to the desired page immediately and easily.
• Don't put your navigation at the very top of the screen. Tips for Images on iPhones
• The images must be small. Yes, the iPhone can zoom and unzoom in on images, but the smaller they are, in both dimensions and download time, the happier your wireless customers will be. Optimizing images is always a good idea, but for cell phone pages, it's critical.
• Images must download quickly. Images take up a lot of space on Web pages when you're viewing them from an iPhone. And while they are often very nice and make the pages look better when viewed on a full-screen Web browser, they often get in the way on a mobile device.
• Don't put large images at the top of the page. The disadvantage of using large images is that it takes a lot of time to load up on display. This is often repeated on most web pages. Make it a point to avoid displaying large images in order to keep your users interested in your page.
Aspects to Avoid in iPhone designs to make it user-friendly
A mobile friendly page must be clean and clearly defined in order for users to visit it often. As I mentioned earlier, if you really want to have these on your page, you can, but make sure that the site works without them.
• Flash - most cell phones do not support Flash, so it's not a good idea to include it on your wireless pages.
• Cookies - most cell phones have no cookie support. iPhones do have cookie support.
• Frames - even if the browser supports them, think about the dimensions of the screen. Frames just don't work on mobile devices - they're very difficult or impossible to read.
• Tables - Don't use tables for layout on a mobile page. And try to avoid tables in general. They aren't supported on every cellphone (although iPhones and other smartphones support them) and you can end up with strange results.
• Nested tables - if you must use a table, make sure not to nest it in another table. These are difficult for desktop browsers to support, and at best make the page load more slowly.
• Absolute measures - in other words, don't define the dimensions of objects in absolute sizes (like pixels, millimeters, or inches). If you define something as 100px wide, on one mobile device that might be half the screen and on another it might be two times the width. Relative sizes (like ems and percentages) work best.
• Fonts - don't assume that any of the fonts you're used to having access to will be available on the cell phones.
Web pages that display mobile devices with WiFi and cell phone access to the internet rake in large amount of customers. Here we give you an entire designing technique for mobile devices like iPhones, other smartphones, cellphones, PDAs, and even palm-sized computers. Along with it you also learn the art of marketing your web pages over the internet in order to gain more customers
There are four basic rules to create a good site for a palm sized device:
1. Stick to basic HTML tags such as: p, br, b, i, pre, headers (h1-6), blockquote, center, ul, ol, li, images, and simple tables
2. Avoid frames, layers, imagemaps, plugins, Javascript, Java, and CSS*
3. Keep your layout small, and avoid clutter
4. Be aware of how graphics are displayed
Graphics
Graphics are tricky on many mobile devices. Most mobile browsers support images, but some are not in color, and they often have lower resolution than a personal computer.
Then there is the size. Many mobile devices have a screen width and height of about 150x150 pixels. iPhones and other smartphones are larger, but still smaller than a standard monitor. Many devices will resize your images to fit that small screen, which can result in really ugly images. And even if they don't resize, if they are too much larger than the screen, they'll be hard for your readers to view.
HTML
Many (non-smartphone) mobile devices support a limited version of HTML 3.2. If you stick with basic layout and formatting tags, you'll create a better site for your mobile readers.
Content
Content is where your mobile page will succeed or fail. Balancing out your content to be enough to satisfy your customers and easy to download is the key. Equip your site with all necessary information and technical graphics to make it look appealing to users as well as knowledgeable.
If you are looking to circumvent the burgeoning budgets and multiple steps involved in building brands online, IGM Creative Group is the answer. Here is your opportunity to launch cohesive, effective and comprehensive marketing campaigns for ensuring visibility and profitability of your business.
No comments:
Post a Comment