Julie's Web Services: Web Site Customization for Mobile Devices

Why should you design different sites for different browsers?

This is a screen shot from a site I designed in June of 2010:



The site is nice design. Layout is solid and clean. But when I loaded it on my iPod touch, it was a mess:

• the image on the bottom left overlapped the menu;
• The javascript functions didn't work well;
• it was difficult to read the menu items;

So I inserted a piece of code which looks at the browser being used to access the site. If it's an iPod touch, a Blackberry, an Android or one of many other available mobile devices, it looks more like the site shown on the right.

What does this mean? If you design sites differently across different browsers...

• ...more people are able to access your site in a fashion which is useful and meaningful to them;
• ...information is streamlined to the necessary and relevant. YouTube videos, for example, do not work embedded on iPods, so I don't embed youTube videos on iPod versions of sites. This saves valuable space.

Site design is no longer just about what the page looks like on a computer. It needs to be about what it looks like on most any device, and while some of those devices have become very big, others have become very small. Sometimes that means eliminating certain bells and whistles on a site. Other times it means simplifying the design, without sacrificing the experience for those using fullscreen browsers.

Having a site customized for a mobile device is one more service I offer, and I welcome the opportunity to help you design something that's big enough to do what you want and yet small enough to let your readers view it on the go.

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We highly recommend working with Julie to develop your website. She’s responsive, flexible, funny, and very patient with web neophytes. She's knowledgeable and creative about designing for/in cyberspace, and she works quickly. Julie translated our books & ideas into a truly unique website.

--Christie Sarles & Jillian VanNostrand
Radical Weeds Books with Seeds
http://www.radicalweeds.com/