Design Websites for the Apple iphone
The Apple iPhone is part of a class of mobile phones called smartphones. It has an impressive battery lifespan and allows users to surf the Net even while on the go. Research has shown that the iphone is used nine times more than the next Smartphone which is the Windows mobile.
If you are a web designer like me, you may have started wondering what you can do to improve your website by not only making it look fantastic on PCs and laptops but also on mobiles too. With the iPhone’s display size of 480-by-320-pixel resolution, it takes a little bit more than designing your website to fit a smaller screen size.
Here are a few ideas to keep in mind when building your website:
• You can design web pages for wide-screen and Flash enabled browsers, however check that the important information is easy to see even on a small screen that cannot manage any special applications (such as Ajax, Flash, Javascript, cookies, etc.). Anything more than XHTML Basic will be more than what some mobile phones are able to handle.
• The iPhone automatically scales websites when necessary. Therefore, build web pages that have multiple thin columns instead of pages with one big column. If the content is narrower on a normal web page, the less the Web page will be scaled down to fit into its window.
• Try putting your content on multiple pages to make them easier to read as it can be hard to read huge sections of text on one page on your mobile phone.
• Images on a website often make websites look nicer when seen on a full screen. However, by keeping images small and optimized, users are much happier as they do not need to wait long for the images to be downloaded.
• Keep your links short as they may get annoying after a while if users are often visiting your website and need to type in long URLs.
Hope these tips help. Happy designing!!