Mobile question - again

[Artyboots]

Hello all,

I have just finished and uploaded our company website. It can be seen and works mostly in Ipods and pads, and on Android tablets. I really enjoyed making it.

BUT most of our customers, and we, use Blackberries. All the text is smooshed to the left hand side of the page and the site is unviewable. I researched a bit and realised I have not picked the right program for this, have I? The Xara tech note blames it on Blackberry.....

I note that Gary's Xara-made sites also smoosh to one side, and if anyone would know how to avoid that it would be the very talented Gary But Xara's own web site doesn't do it. That also appears to be written in their own program. Anyway, it can be seen on a Blackberry. Would they be generous enough to explain how they adapted it, and whether this is reproducable by mere mortals. I tried the HTML text tweak thing but it made no difference.

If I can't find a way to adapt the DP7 site for Blackberries I will have to start again in Netobjects Fusion. Its sites don't even need the templates they provide for mobiles. Their sites are viewable in anything at sizes up to 1500px width and more. No idea why they are so adaptable. Anyway, having to redo the site for Fusion would be a big bore after all the effort put into learning Xara. We are very happy with the site, and even more happy with the program. But we can't live with our site being unviewable by our important mobile users.

Please guys. Can we think of something? What if I were to put the text into a placeholder, and treat it as code. Actually, might go experiment with that.

If you can think of anything at all, I would be very grateful to hear your ideas.

Thanks in advance.

Ali

[gwpriester]

The only thing the very talented Gary (thank you, thank you very much ) can come up with is another product. The new NetObjects Fusion 12 says it can create websites for mobile devices from the websites you create with the product. Though these devices and OS's are being developed so fast it would be hard to keep up with them all. Apple for example has just introduced a new mobile OS to be released in July for all of their i labeled devices.

I suspect that the Xara website was created in Dreamweaver with all the graphics designed in Designer. And that is how I use NetObjects Fusion 11 when I use it.

[Artyboots]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for replying. And you ARE very talented. I wasn't being creepy!

This is such a problem. Interesting - I made some text in Fusion, copied the source code and stuck it into an HTML placeholder in XDP7, and it previewed wonderfully. I just couldn't see it in any browser when uploaded - which defies logic, really. I never know what is fake and what is real because our host's CGI server is so old and unreliable. I don't have the time to change host at the moment. Nor can I experiment any more.

What a problem.... I have Fusion 12, and it has nothing special for mobile pages. Not really. It just has teeny tiny templates as wizards for certain screen sizes. You can barely see them to work on. They seem a bit pointless, really, because you still have to design a separate mobile site. Its own, full-sized sites do a very good job without any adaptation. They resize automatically provided you design with text boxes and are light on anything fixed. Look at any of Kitty's sites in a Blackberry and you will see what I mean. They load like the wind and look the same on every screen.

We really need Xara to have a think about this. And I know this isn't the dear Xara section, but whilst writing can I say that a clever export facility - to mobile (even if it just welded all the graphics together into a background, and stuck text on top - I DUNNO!!!! LOL!!!) ...... Or if impossible, a new product - a cut-down version of the web designer program specifically for mobile sites "Xara Mobile Designer", would be fantastic.

Like they have nothing else to do...

If you discover anything please let me know. There might still be a miracle.

Thanks!

Ali

[covoxer]

There's no reason to deal with this since BlackBerry has recently switched to WebKit based browser.
We can not restrain our possibilities by trying to provide compatibility with countless outdated and rarely used browsers, especially those that do not follow web standards completely. Instead we are concentrating on providing as good compatibility as possible with the most widely used browsers and web standards (thus with all browsers that fully follow standards).

Current market share is as follows:
IE8 - 31%
Firefox - 22%
Chrome - 13%
IE6 - 10%
Safari - 7%
IE7 - 7%
IE9 - 4%
Opera - 2%

We support all of these browsers officially.
BlackBerry has less than 0.01% (i.e. less than 1/10000).
Statistics from: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/

[Artyboots]

Looked at our competitor web sites, which are also smooshed on my Blackberry. Think I shall stop worrying. Thanks for the statistic, actually, because I had no idea there were so few blackberries around.

A