Web sites for Blackberry

Hello,

Our stats show a load of people trying to access our web site using a Blackberry, so we have to address it, but I am loathe to leave Designer Pro 7, which I love.

I've been experimenting a bit. The graphics themselves display fine on a Blackberry phone, so the structure is ok. It's the text that is the problem. HOWEVER, the Blackberry I have will display named HTML block text. Would it be possible for us to have a little, very basic, design template for Blackberry which has simple graphics at the header and footer, and block text text areas? We could then put a button link for mobiles on the home page so that Blackberry users could find their way out of the unreadable mess they are otherwise presented with.

I am not a coder, so don't know whether any mark up could go in a block text area - simple bold, or colour, for example. But that would be even better - to have a selection of simple text block types for the mobile sites. I think this would be useful for other, regular sites, too, at times.

The text would look plain whatever, and I appreciate we would not be able to use Xara's amazing feature set on Blackberry sites, but it is a fair price to pay for being able to give a link to a cut down site accessible by Blackberry/mobile users.

Thanks for listening.

Ali

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Would it be possible for us to have a little, very basic, design template for Blackberry which has simple graphics at the header and footer, and block text text areas?

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Yes, it would be possible.
Should be very straight forward to make your own, yes?

Hi Shapeshifter,

This is the Dear Xara section, so it was a suggestion to Xara. I don't know anyone here apart from Gary. Are you a Xaran? It probably would concern the marketers at Xara rather than the programmers. If there were something like this, however simple, Xara would be able to advertise it. Netobjects Fusion, which is a competitor, and many of us have really loved it, has only simple mobile templates (no amazing new feature, no special programming), but that is making sales for them (I suspect people don't realise that regular Fusion web sites display excellently anyway on mobiles, up to quite large sizes!)

It was a deliberate decision at Xara not to cater for Blackberries, and I understand it, but it doesn't make you feel any better when you see your stats and the number of customers who must have been frustrated by what they saw.

Yes, I can make my own. But then again, not really. You can see my post asked whether anything else could go into special blocks of text, so that you could bold or colour different text. I am not a coder, which is why I ask. If it would be simple, perhaps Xara could stick a few Blackberry/mobile templates in the gallery, and have a whole new feature to market.

Ali

We do not officially support any mobile browsers so we can not include any such templates. Especially for any particular device.

Hi John,

I know what the present situation is. I was just making a suggestion. There would be little point suggesting something that existed already. And I thought people might be interested to see there was a workaround for Blackberries.

Perhaps you can afford to ignore the needs of your customers. Frankly, most people can't.

A

You don't understand. We can not include a "workaraund" template as you suggest. Some people may add not supported features to it, and we'd get fair complaints about Blackberry template based pages not working well on Blackberries.
However, if you have experience making pages for these devices, you can create such template and share it on this forum.

Hello Ali,

Using most tools for web sites, the same issue is faced these days when designing for, in my case, both computer and mobile access. Perhaps a post on Xara Users would be of interest. There is more about this subject of course. And...I don't use Xara for site building but together we may be able to work out a template you can use as a basis.

http://board.xara-users.info/viewtop...&t=2407#p16897

Take care, Mike

Thanks, Mike. Am working this weekend but will have another look at it next week.

Best wishes.

Ali