Timeshifting Interactive Blog

Mobile is where the web is going. Trend statistics from Google show that by the middle of this year mobile search volume (searches done on mobile devices like the iPhone) will exceed that of desktop search. With the recent announcement of the iPad, and the new generation of Android devices, progress in this area is showing no signs of abating soon and Adobe’s pending release of the Flash CS5’s ‘Packager for iPhone’ is just going add fuel to this fire.

We were an early developer of mobile sites for WAP Phones, almost 10 years ago now, and it’s great to see how far the technology has come.  There are still limitations, but the scope of what you can do with HTML5 capable mobile browsers is amazing in comparison.  The flow on of web standards from desktop browsers has also been a great benefit.  Gone are the days of supporting possibly up to 100 different handset configurations.  The migration of mobile API’s (like geolocation and location services) to desktop browsers is easing the development burden even further.

Many of our sites, including this one, now incorporate a mobile style sheet and iPhone springboard icons to ensure good user experience on all devices. This an important consideration when developing a site, as the range of devices it’s likely to be viewed on has increased considerably. Visual design plays an important role here; will it work well in a single column format? is the text size big enough to read on a small screen? For a lot of sites these questions remain unanswered, because they were never considered.  And if you’re not considering your mobile audience, now is the time to start.

A common situation, at least for me, with web graphics is you’ll get an image that needs transparency but due to file size constaints or browser compatibility has to be an 8-bit png.

These images undoubtedly will contain far more than 256 colours, so some form of dithering would be required to make them more visually acceptable. The problem is images with mixed content.  Text looks best with ‘no dither’, photographic images almost always with ‘diffusion’ and in many cases gradients with a ‘pattern dither’.  Photoshop one allows you to choose one, so which area do you sacrifice?

Read the rest of this entry »

Website testing or quality assurance seems to all too often get overlooked.  At the very least basic cross browser testing should be done, and it’s surprising how often issues here can sneak through, and not always those you’d expect.  The most common case is the ‘web designer’ with little front-end knowledge creating a site that only works in Internet Explorer, though a similar case is developers who work in Firefox or Safari making sites that work fine in those browsers but have weird glitches in IE.  However, cross browser is just the start.

For sites with user accounts every page should be tested with logged in and logged out states, do parts of the UI change between the two? Does the layout look weird or broken with elements added or removed? Does an Internet Explorer rendering bug occur on interaction? Then let’s add Ajax into the mix. When you start to consider these cases, it’s easy to see why you need solid QA plan and that allowing 20% of the development budget isn’t unreasonable, especially on iterative designs.

So are you sure your site actually works in all cases?  If not it might be time to reassess your QA strategy.