Olesol's List: Hjemmeside

• • Mobile is exploding
   
  • Mobile forces you to focus
   
  • Mobile extends your capabilities
• Focussing on the mobile platform forces the developer to prioritize the important things. What are the key actions and data for your application? Strip everything away and focus on just that. The end result will be an app which is simpler, easier to understand, just as functional and much better. This brings development back from flashy extraneous eye candy to a functional site which is designed to serve the user.
• progressive enhancement describes a process of starting with the basics and then building up functionality for richer clients. That is, instead of designing for a rich client and taking away bits and pieces for simpler devices, we start with semantic HTML and the progressively add CSS, Javascript and other goodies which improve the content.
• Responsive Web Design
• fluid layouts which work well on a variety of screen sizes. By using floated divs, which are relatively narrow, layouts can adapt to the screen size. The secret sauce here is the use of media queries to serve progressively enhanced CSS to clients with more screen real estate. The “mobile” site is the “default” site suitable for the most basic of clients and the “desktop” site is the enhancement.
• • simple is better than complex,
   
  • fast is better than slow,
   
  • sparse is better than busy,
   
  • fewer options are better than more,
   
  • most important to least important,
   
  • every element must add,
   
  • every page to satisfy a single aim.
   
   

  Some more practical pointers after looking around at a few decent mobile sites:

   
   
  • banner to be frugal on vertical space,
   
  • search is crucial gateway to site,
   
  • main content first,
   
  • single “focus” image for the page is OK,
   
  • other ancialliary images are distracting,
   
  • lists are good,
   
  • primary nav is available but not necesarily at top of page,
   
  • collapsing divs are good to compress blocks to be readily consumed on single screen,
   
  • minimise clicks by displaying simple form on that page if user likely to want to take action,
   
  • minimise typing if possible,
   
  • homepage gateway to user paths with focus on single key task.

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