Mobile Devices...I have Searched but still am Unlcear about how to use with Xara

[Bassman]

Hello,

I have been searching about designing to accomodate for mobile devices and it seems a redirect to a separate site is the best way to go about this.

Is this a tested method? Is this a matter of making a "smaller" version of the main site or are there other considerations as this is on the fringe of Xara's capabilities?

Thanks for your help.

[gwpriester]

I hate to recommend another product, but NetObjects Fusion 12 claims to support publishing for mobile devices. I think this is an important consideration and one that I hope Xara will address in future releases. I am still using NOF 11 and using it less and less since Xara added website creation capabilities. But if I need to create content for mobile devices, it will be a consideration.

[scruffy.thedog]

who knows in april......wdp7???????????????

[Bassman]

Thanks for your input. So as it stands, there is no way to make a mobile friendly site in Xara? I have Dreamweaver but am not a code person. Basically, I need a site that will be on the internet to be useable by people with their phones and pads.

Do I want to design the site in Xara then redirect to a separate site designed in Dreamweaver or NOF? Is the possible and reliable?

Thanks

[pauland]

Do I want to design the site in Xara then redirect to a separate site designed in Dreamweaver or NOF? Is the possible and reliable?

Not a problem at all. HTML is HTML regardless of what you use to produce it.

[Bassman]

Let me re-phrase. Is the redirect possible and reliable? Meaning does an instruction like this work on every fifth try or on pretty much all of the devices?

This stuff is getting pretty complicated.

[pauland]

The problem with mobiles is that detecting that it is a mobile is not completely straightforward. There are a number of approaches that can be made but they won't most likely catch every case (basically you'll need some javascript to detect which mobile browser is being used). The other thing to consider is that mobile displays vary widely in size and that is a big problem for a web designer such as Xara (because it works in fixed sizes). A technique that will work in most cases would be to check the browser window size and use that as a guage of whether the browser is on a mobile device or not.

My comment was intended to say that it makes no differrence how the HTML is produced for redirection to work. On reflection, most web designs that use CSS (ie not Xara) are able to avoid redirection by using CSS techniques to cope with display variants. This isn't a viable technique for Xara designed sites.

So, in short, using Xara for mobile is harder than I first thought - the redirection isn't quite so straightforward, nor is it 100% reliable (because checking for all browser/display variants may not be possible). You can always go for the easy option - put a link to a mobile friendly site on your main web page.

I think that the other hurdle is in design mentality. Mobile sites are designed quite differrently to desktop sites. People don't browse using mobile devices in quite the same way because of the size of the displays and the size of their fingers! Mobile sites aren't desktop sites made smaller.

Anyway, it's certainly not as straightforward as it could be and the mobile platform is a bit of an achilles heel for Xara web generation. I would think that Xara are mulling over this and will probably offer a redirect solution at some stage. That's a guess, not insider knowledge.

You are right - this stuff can get complicated.

[edit: this should be useful: http://detectmobilebrowser.com/ ]

[Bassman]

Thank you very much for your input. The link on the index page might be the best option along with a redirect as a backup. I have not payed much attention to this but the mobile world is getting so large that it can not be ignored. I will need to do more research on the way to design for these devices as you are right, there are a lot of sizes out there.