Optimizing sites for PDA, laptops and other wireless devices

rtroxel posted this at 14:27 — 14th November 2006.

Joined: Mar 2003

My current problem as Webmaster is how to optimize my site (actually, it's my club's site) so that it can be visited by people using PDAs, laptops or slow Internet connections. People who visit the site on fast connections want many photos, plus background music. Obviously, people with PDAs can't access such extras.

Are there any good guides or handbooks (online or off) that describe practical methods of optimizing your site for all visitors? I've already squeezed photos and posted disclaimers like "If you aren't on broadband, this page may take a few seconds to load."

andy206uk posted this at 16:25 — 14th November 2006.

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

rtroxel;210477 wrote: People who visit the site on fast connections want many photos, plus background music.

What gives you that idea? I hate music loading on webpages and I'm more interested in text than pictures in most cases (obviously except on sites like flickr, youtube etc) - I'm on 8Mb broadband by the way...

If you create a standards compliant CSS based layout you'll find that your site will scale quite well for mini browsers although at the expense of the site styling with some browsers.

Andy

demonhale posted this at 01:12 — 15th November 2006.

He has: 3,278 posts

Joined: May 2005

andy is right, use css, or at least use two css, make a subdomain for small screens like if for example I have a site demonhale.com, my for small screen site would either be on the subdomains wap.demonhale.com or mobile.demonhale.com , then just use a style sheet with less images... That would pretty much do the trick... Remember you can always use multiple stylesheets...

Arch posted this at 16:00 — 15th November 2006.

They have: 31 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

Is there a message forum on your site?

rtroxel posted this at 16:36 — 15th November 2006.

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

Is there a message forum on your site?

I can't direct you to my site, because it's built for my college alumni group. There is a feedback page, as well as other information from my fellow alums. They are the only people who visit the site, and some of them want a lot of pictures and music, but I'm reluctant to provide these things, because of bandwidth limitations.

Arch posted this at 17:02 — 15th November 2006.

They have: 31 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

Like the previous poster said, CSS might be the best option. Also, you might want to look at browser detection scripts and codes and determine if they're on a PDA/mobile device or not. It's not the best option, though. Lastly, maybe have images and music be viewed as an option, like [Click here to view this user's image].

Megan posted this at 17:30 — 15th November 2006.

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

You could also put the multimedia stuff in a separate section that people would have the choice to view them or not.

A few more tips:

check out Cameron Moll's site - he does a lot of work with mobile web design. He is coming out with a book soon.
use alternate stylesheets for mobile devices. This can solve a lot of your problems, although I think they will still try to download multimedia content even if you're hiding it using CSS
Try Opera's small screen view mode to see what it will look like on a mobile device. You could even recommend that people use Opera mini if they can. I've heard that it's much, much better than other mobile browsers which often have trouble displaying stuff and have really slow rendering speeds.

Megan
Connect with us on Facebook!

rtroxel posted this at 19:06 — 15th November 2006.

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

Thank you. I'll begin with CSS.

andy206uk posted this at 01:38 — 17th November 2006.

He has: 1,758 posts

Joined: Jul 2002

Megan;210555 wrote:

Try Opera's small screen view mode to see what it will look like on a mobile device. You could even recommend that people use Opera mini if they can. I've heard that it's much, much better than other mobile browsers which often have trouble displaying stuff and have really slow rendering speeds.

Totally agree on that one. I use it on my k750i and it's the best mobile browser I've ever used.

Andy

rtroxel posted this at 02:22 — 17th November 2006.

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

Try Opera's small screen view mode

Yes. I downloaded Opera 9 and checked out the 2 sites in that mode. Actually, they don't look bad. I'm going to add some music and see (hear) what that is like.

Thanks again.

BTW: Adobe Illustrator does a great job of minimizing photos for the Web.

Neutron2k posted this at 14:39 — 20th November 2006.

He has: 113 posts

Joined: Jul 2005

you can provide alternate css sheets for different devices. I wrote an article on this at http://www.n2kdesign.co.uk/viewarticle.aspx?aID=31, altough this article needs to be updated for the newer handheld stylesheet media attribute for handheld and a few others.

maybe that should be my next article

I also wrote an article on pda sites:

http://www.n2kdesign.co.uk/viewarticle.aspx?aID=25

rtroxel posted this at 19:02 — 30th November 2006.

He has: 286 posts

Joined: Mar 2003

you can provide alternate css sheets for different devices.

I picked up an interesting book on CSS, "Bulletproof Web Design" by Dan Cederholm. It has a lot of information on using CSS coding to pick up the speed of your site, without sacrificing content. I've tested some of the code, and it does seem to work, but this whole experience is still a learning curve for me!