Template for MOBILES

[DavidDB]

I had hoped Xara Web Designer had provided simple templates for fast loading Mobiles / Smartphones, With estimates of mobile access to the net rising monthly clients are increasingly demanding a mobile cut-down version of their content.

Does anyone else see this trend and have you created mobile templates?

Looking around for sources of information for mobile sites I discovered a BBC guide that I felt compelled to share with the xara community.

PDF Link to BBC Mobile Style Guide 1.1 (5.46MB) http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/guideline...compressed.pdf

This style guide outlines the principles and standards for the creation of mobile web pages for the BBC. It is intended to be used by designers, developers and producers.
This document does not set out to constrain what sites should or should not be implemented, but aims instead to establish a consistent quality of treatment for fundamental elements across the BBC mobile web.

Main areas covered
1. High level wireframes of all major page types and the rules for constructing them
2. Information on the structure and the limitations of each section
3. Detailed visual styles and specification of screen elements
4. Technical requirements and standards for BBC mobile web pages.

[mwenz]

Hello David--thanks for the link to the BBC's style guide.

While pre-made templates would be nice, there isn't a whole lot of work to redesign an Xara template to fit the space chosen for the lowest-common denominator in width and style. The main issue is that with fixed-positioning that WD or XDP uses for sites, you will need to choose a width and stick with it for the design. Meaning, if you wish to fit older mobiles or other small screen mobiles, it better be 230px or less. In this regard, the site wouldn't fit the BBC's desire of width fluidity.

After that decision is made, rearranging the elements of a template is reasonably straight forward. Other considerations also need made--no flash-based elements, etc. Unfortunately, for an existing site of more than a few pages, the work is a little more involved to make a mobile version, but is also doable.

As mentioned on XU where you also link the the nice BBC style guide, you can then use the .htaccess file (on linux hosts) to determine if a visitor is using a mobile device and switch them over to a version of the site made for them. It all happens pretty seamlessly. If on a Windows-based host, you would need to use a bit of javascript or other means.

Take care, Mike