With mobile web browsing gaining momentum, it's important to consider the way your website looks and feels to visitors on mobile devices. We've recently completed an optimization of our own site, ElementFusion.com, for mobile devices, with strong optimizations for the iPhone and Google phone. We're now offering this service to our clients. For more information, please contact one of our sales consultants.
Currently, nearly 60% of people accessing websites through mobile devices are using the iPhone or Google phone. When users of these two devices access our site, they get a customized view created specifically to display on their device (pictured to the right and below). The content of our site is the same, but selective CSS techniques allow us to shape how the content is rendered and formatted on these two devices.
Other mobile devices render the content differently. Those that support handheld CSS receive our customized, stripped down layout which makes the content as accessible as possible for the largest number of devices. Other devices that don't support CSS at all will render the content gracefully by its semantic markup.
This type of mobile optimization is possible because our own WaterCMS, SkyCMS and LightCMS systems are built around XHTML / CSS standards, without any special languages or conventions that could muddy up the process. With our CMS system, we are able to easily create these optimizations while leaving the website content intact.
If you're interested in exploring mobile optimization for your site, please contact our sales team to learn more. If you're a designer using our LightCMS system, be watching for upcoming tutorials explaining the behind the scenes details of how we performed the optimizations on our own site. If you have knowledge of XHTML / CSS code, you can likely perform these optimizations for your own clients yourself.
Screenshots
Here's a look at the full resolution Element Fusion site.
Below are two iPhone screen shots. The first shows the upper part of the home page as rendered on the iPhone. You can see the feature region is optimized for the screen size and the menu is simplified into our three primary menu items. The second shot shows the lower part of the home page, where you can see some mobile-specific content created to allow users to call us or find us on their mobile mapping software, each with a single click.
Posted on
Monday, May 4, 2009
by Tim Wall
filed under