What's Your Opinion On Mobilizing Your Site? cross device theme

[imjjss 0]

I'm not a big mobile phone fan but I know many people relay on mobile to do lots of things. I'm thinking-- is it worth the efforts making my site usable on mobile phones?It does cost a lot of jobs. Onc stylesheet for each identical device, then, provide user a theme switcher. Or, one stylesheet for all but use javascript to swich style rules. Either way will take a lots of dedicate jobs. If nowaday's users really use mobile browsing web often, then, it worth trying. But, what if majority still prefer sit infront of desk and browing web in ease?What do you think?

[yordan 10]

Depends if many people use their mobile for surfing ?
Could be related to this : http://forums.xisto.com/topic/97957-topic/?findpost=1064411506

[Techn9kotine 0]

Well the main thing you want to look at is your content. If your site is that of a social nature, many users enjoy being able to check their messages, notifications, etc, on the go. If people find your site while surfing on a mobile device, you want them to view it in a nice format for their device. You don't want a "well, I'll just look at it at home later." And then forget about it. And another good point, I sold my laptop altogether and solely rely on my iPod touch. Many sites (including this one) would be much better to use for me, with a usable mobile interface. So you have to decide if the income/user activity and happiness, is worth the investment of designing a mobile version.Hope that helps you, friend.

Edited December 23, 2010 by Techn9kotine (see edit history)

[imjjss 0]

My site is about language and culture, but not limited to that. Once people started, they can do anything on my site , and of course, they can become social with each other. That makes me thinking to provide a mobile version

[mahesh2k 0]

Until and unless i get 100 dedicated mobile users per day on my analytics i'm not going to worry about it. And after this goal i think i'll just use wordpress mobile theme switcher for the user. This is handy in case if any mobile user logs in to my site. But looking at the way people browse on the web and the results which are related to the site that i develop, i rarely get any mobile user. Most of the users surf my topics on desktop or ipad or similar big display device. This is because of the topics. I think mobile users these days use browser for desperate search queries or some info that they want to clarify immediately.

[mik1405241541 0]

Web designers should now be using techniques that are adaptable to devices. If you're not designing websites with the expectation that it will be viewed across a massive range of screen resolutions and devices, you're not doing your job properly.

[imjjss 0]

How much does it cost to bring our site to meet our expectation. I've being browsing through a lot of website to see what is a crossing browser theme look like. Unfortunately, not much greate example. If you take a look at WordPress free theme section, 5 themes are all one colum, I don't think they can meet my expectation more than normal themes. I also find a website, looks charming, well designed, tasteful. 2 colum. The designer charge minimum $8000 for a site design. Sure I wouldn't spend $8000 before my site can make that amount. I went back to check the site several times, just by chance, yesterday I opened it in IE, a big mess! All buttons missing out, when narrow IE window, the site is cut off inproperly. Wow, I think, $8000 for this?-- unless for charity purpose.

[grameenmela 0]

That will be great.People can access this site through mobile phone.Im sure it will be a great news for this forum as well as all the users who will access this site through mobile phone.For me it will be great.

[mahesh2k 0]

Web designers should now be using techniques that are adaptable to devices. If you're not designing websites with the expectation that it will be viewed across a massive range of screen resolutions and devices, you're not doing your job properly.

No need to do the job properly. If you have 1 or 0 traffic from devices then there is no need to use mobile device themes at all. The reason is many people don't surf using mobile on some sites and many niches are still on it that get no mobile traffic at all. Web designers if waste their time thinking about such hypothetical visitors then there is loss of money. Site should be build for browsers and not for specific devices or it's resolution.

[yordan 10]

The designer charge minimum $8000 for a site design.

Now, the question is clear. Is access through mobiles worth $8000 ? This gives an idea of the kind of sites which could ask this kind of question. Is this amount of money rather small compared to what you earn with your website? Do you expect to get more than this amount of money when reaching mobile public?
Most of times the answer will be clearly no!

[mahesh2k 0]

Well i don't blame designer for charging 8k. Think about it, people have high thoughts of design and they bombard it on designer. And what's wrong if he charges that much high ? not all top brands sites look great on multiple browsers. You think apple site look good on opera mini ? tea shark ? Site that looks OK on chrome and firefox rarely looks good on IE. In fact my theme breaks on IE, but i don't care for it. Visitors if not bringing me some money or value in return i dont care much about what looks good for them. Mobile themes also breaks revenue stream and many mobile themes are not ready for text ads based display. So in my opinion you can only judge display based on desktop's dominant browser. Not from mobile or other display browsers on devices because there are again many mobile or device browsers which breaks the design. What to expect from designer ?

[mik1405241541 0]

No need to do the job properly.

I would never employ you.

[imjjss 0]

It's about organizing the right strategy within limited resources, targeting the majority visitors.

[tansqrx 0]

I believe the question of using mobile phone templates solely depends on your audience and the purpose of the site. I personally have no plans to make my site mobile friendly. My site (ycoderscookbook.com) has low traffic and I make no money off of it. Additionally, my content is geared towards Microsoft Windows programming so I don’t expect many mobile users to find my useful unless they are viewing it from a Windows desktop or laptop.Designing for mobile devices may also cause some problems that you may not expect. I occasionally use a Blackberry phone to visit websites. The Blackberry has a full featured browser that will display almost everything except Flash. The Blackberry can display CSS and JavaScript just fine in most case. The problem that I have run into is that some sites see my Blackberry browser as a mobile device and serve me the no feature, stripped down, and mostly useless mobile version of their page. This irritates me to no end because I do have the power to view the regular page. In most cases there isn’t even an option to visit the full site. I then leave the page mad and never go back so instead of gaining a mobile customer, they are loosing it.I also think mik isn’t living in the real world with his comments. Adding functionality to a website (such as adding mobile support) takes time and manpower. Time and manpower cost money. I face the same problem all the time at my job where I sometimes estimate software development costs. The customer rarely realizes how much effort goes into creating a single function or feature. When the average productivity for a programmer is between 1-3 source lines of code (SLOC) per hour, the cost for adding a feature that is 100 SLOC really adds up. It is a common practice in software engineering to make the customer sign a contract after the requirements are set. This is to protect the developer from the customer when the customer comes back six months later asking for a “minor” feature to be added. My company then pulls out the contract and explains how they agreed to a particular price for the given requirements; if you want the minor feature then you will have to sign another contract and pay us more money.I’m not familiar with professional webpage design pricing so I don’t know if $8000 is high or low but think of it from an engineering point-of-view. Suppose you have 10,000 mobile visitors a day visit your website and you earn 1/10 of a cent ($0.001) off of each customer (personally high in my opinion but makes for easy math). Then say it costs $8000 to add mobile support to your site. It will take 800 days or a little over 2 years to make any profit off of the new mobile additions. If you change your webpage more than every two years, you may actually be loosing money by creating mobile pages.Most everyone at Xisto creates their own pages because after all this is a free hosting site. When the practical cost of adding mobile support for Xisto users is not money but time, the user will have to decide if the time spent is worth it. I still disagree with mik because my time is worth something and it is not sloppy or “not doing your job properly” if I decide not to add mobile or other browser support. With my busy life I get very little precious time to devote to my hobby and I would much rather create content than write hundreds of CSS files for each browser and mobile profile.

[imjjss 0]

Very well said indeed.I've spent lots of time on my blog recently. Every little adjustment takes me hours if not days. Day after day, my blogs is still not in shape and I start receiving complains from friends and family-- they think I am wasting time on useless stuffs instead of caring for beloved ones.$8000 sounds a lot at first glance, but if count the days I spend on my blog design, more or less 2 months. 2 months' salary should be more than $8000. So, $8000 for a nice design, it worth.But for personal blogs or blogs not generating decent income, that's really out of consideration.