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Guidelines for Adapting Web Site Designs for Mobile Delivery

Wed, Mar 17, 2010 by Scott 1 Comment
Page Content

People on a mobile device are not ‘browsing’, but rather they are looking for a specific piece of information. 
Use the clearest and simplest language instead of a discursive style for site content.

Divide pages into usable but limited size portions.

If pages are too large they will take a long time to load. There are limitations on some mobile devices as to the largest page they can accommodate. Also, we don’t want our users taking a big hit on their (sometimes) limited data plans.

On the other hand, if a page is too short then the user may require multiple page requests to read the relevant information.

Scrolling

The layout of the page should be such that the user can use a simple repeated scroll. The majority of mobile sites scroll vertically, so elements should be “stacked” in this way. Some content requires a secondary scroll, such as maps or some images, but should be avoided wherever possible.

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"Mobifying" Drupal Sites with Mobify.Me

Wed, Jul 22, 2009 by Arnold 4 Comments

For the past few months, we have been looking into ways to help our clients optimize their web sites for the mobile world. The ever-increasing popularity of web-accessible mobile phones is motivating a swift revolution for such "mobification."

In the past, the best way for optimizing a Drupal site for the mobile would be to use the Mobile Theme and use Domain Access. This would allow you to build a site such that m.YourSite.com will go to the site with the mobile theme.

However, there is a new tool available which allows for the simple optimization of web sites for the mobile world. This tool is called Mobify.me. With this tool, you can mobify your Drupal site in a few easy steps:

1) Enter the URL for your web site;

2) Select the content areas in the web site screen shot which you would like to show on the mobile device;

3) Tweak the CSS as it fits based on the emulated iPhone/Mobile view of the selected content areas;

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Drupal and the Mobile World

Wed, May 27, 2009 by Arnold 3 Comments

I am currently at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose where we are exploring how non profits can use mobile technologies for their causes. Some of these non profit mobile applications include:

1) Digital Democracy's Handheld Human Rights: a tool for allowing human rights activists to learn about human right abuses as they happen via SMS messaging.

2) The Extraordinaries: an IPhone based crowdsourcing tool for non profit initiatives. It allows people to help non profits with small tasks such as text translation when they are free using their IPhones.

3) SeeClickFix: a mobile application for users to report non emergency policy issues such as graffiti and use the power of the crowd to voice these issues to the appropriate government bodies.

I was looking at how Drupal can be used to power some of these applications. Even though Drupal is developed primarily as a web content management system, there has been a few recent changes that allow for Drupal to power mobile web sites.

Some information about implementing mobile Drupal web sites are:

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