Mobile variant best practices?

[RedBopete]

If this has been covered elsewhere already, please point me in the right direction.

I recently started adding mobile variants to all my websites using XWD 10 Premium. Making the variant wasn't difficult. What I am finding tricky is what kinds of things should I leave or change on the mobile variant? For example. some sites have a number of .pdf files that the user can view. Is there a point to leaving those on the mobile variant? If not, should the entire page just be left off, or a message stating that they can be viewed better on the main site? How about forms? Are people going to fill out lengthy forms on their smart phone? What changes have some of you made to your mobile variants?

I have to say, having edited text change for both versions is helpful, but when changing the font size or making other changes due to the width difference and having it mess up the layout on my main site is rather annoying. I know I can unshare, but that rather defeats the purpose imho. Anyone else feel the same way?

[gwpriester]

Your points are all valid. Mobile devices, although most can access Wi-Fi, are not nearly as fast as a wired connection to the modem or router. And as you correctly point out, the screen is smaller and entering text is more difficult.

There are PDF readers for mobile devices but many will have have these apps installed.

So, think basics, think simple, and think, low bandwidth and I think you will be OK.

[Egg Bramhill]

I have to say, having edited text change for both versions is helpful, but when changing the font size or making other changes due to the width difference and having it mess up the layout on my main site is rather annoying. I know I can unshare, but that rather defeats the purpose imho. Anyone else feel the same way?

This can be a real bummer! What you need to do almost immeadiately you create a mobile variant, is to select part of each type of style in turn (H1, H2, H3 and Normal) and adjust font sizes to requirements & go "Update style in this variant". It's not the most intuitive of things.

[forresthowie]

Thanks for that last comment Egg, that explains a lot that I wasn't quite understanding.

May I ask a couple of yes/no questions?

1 - Does having a variant increase load speed across the pages? Ie will a single variant page load more quickly than one with two alternative variants? My site is slow enough as is.

2 - Extending the question I just asked, if I 'unshare' an image that's used in two variants, does that make the speed slow even more (because there's now 'two' images rather than 'one')?

[Acorn]

Thanks for that last comment Egg, that explains a lot that I wasn't quite understanding.
May I ask a couple of yes/no questions?
1 - Does having a variant increase load speed across the pages? Ie will a single variant page load more quickly than one with two alternative variants? My site is slow enough as is.
2 - Extending the question I just asked, if I 'unshare' an image that's used in two variants, does that make the speed slow even more (because there's now 'two' images rather than 'one')?

A really old Thread and the answers cannot be Yes/No as there are too many variations.

1. A variant is usually just more text and layout, using existing image assets. The load speed will decrease but not so you, Google or anyone might notice or care.
2. Unsharing will increase the image payload but modern image file formats (WebP) are leaner. The better approach would be to reference a link to the external filename for the image; Xara does not do this readily. You need to Use Placeholder > Replace with image once and thereafter build a Placeholder scaled to the required size with HMTL: <img src="index_htm_files/imagename.webp" width="100%" height="100%" />; a technique I have described many times already.

Acorn