While I’ve always been a big fan of simple, CSS-based designs, that applies even more in the mobile market. While the speed and power of these devices and the networks they use is quickly increasing, the fact remains that we want to give users the best experience we can now.
With a site that relies on CSS for it’s design instead of background images and the like, that CSS can quickly be minimized. Sure, you can create and optimize a sprite away to your here’s content, but this can be an immense time-sink while still not giving you the benefits of having your design come from CSS.
Similarly, there are a variety of browsers to test against in the mobile market, and a simple design has a far higher chance to remain consistent among these different browsers without relying on hacks. Which, again, makes your site far more maintainable and less complex from a developer’s perspective, making life far easier, not to mention more efficient.
Just another reason clean, simple sites will make a developer’s life better.
Mobile devices capable of browsing the Internet are exploding. Both in numbers and what is being made for them. Between apps like Foursquare and Gowalla and the hype that has surrounded them, we’re still in the infancy of this movement.
What is extremely significant for developers is how many different rendering engines they’ll have to test against. Even if a site or app isn’t mobile-centric, in most cases it still “has to work.” If you thought testing in IE6, 7 and 8, FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera was too much to test against, just think of all of the mobile versions of many of these browsers.
What got me thinking about this was trying to write a blog post in Opera Mini. I thought I would try it out on my Droid Incredible, but alas, there was some screwy CSS that meant I couldn’t even type in the textarea field. Thus, I’m writing from Android’s default browser. Sorry WordPress – just giving you one more thing to do.
Always more to test apparently.
So yes, I am writing this with my brand new Droid Incredible. Granted, writing a full blog post with a mobile device may not be the easiest thing and I doubt I’m going to get a full one out but I can’t help but be impressed with how easy even writing just a little bit on this touch screen is.
Though, not going to lie – I think a lot of my typing is going to have to be on Twitter. Paragraphs are a little much.
Can’t really explain how much I’m liking this though…
