Mobile “Phones”

by Mark M on 03-27-12 in Graphic Design, Mobile Web, SEO, Web, Web Design

In the past couple of years, new breeds of computers found their way into our pockets, purses and briefcases. No longer is there the form factor comprised of solely the desktop and/or the laptop. A whole host of new names have crept into modern argot. Ipads. Iphones. Androids. Xooms. Ultra-portable Laptops. Netbooks. In Dash systems. These new devices are no longer powered by the supposed “standard’s bearers” of Apple or Microsoft. A host of new players like Google, Linux., Palm OS, Symbian, amongst many others are competing ferociously for your attention and fervently for your monthly subscription lucre.

Steve Jobs’s public fight with Adobe over Flash represents the barest hint of the challenges graphics artists and web development teams confront when trying to create content for this fractured world of 24/7 connectivity. The “perfect” world is promised to us all in the form of HTML5, as though this “standard” will provide platform interoperability. It’s way way too early to make the assertions currently being bandied about tools and techniques that are promised “real soon now.” What is a graphic artist or web developer to do in this environment right NOW?

We might lament the fact that Flash animations and videos won’t play on a hundred & twenty million devices and bristle at Steve Jobs intransigence. Our clients, however, take a more mercenary view and demand that THEIR content display EXACTLY the same on every platform. Errrr, Uhmmm, Uhhhh – that’s what they pay us for – right? After all, we’re the content creation experts – right?

It was during one of these lamentations that a colleague blurted out, “I am going to do a site that is nothing but PNG files with hotspots – not a single bit of text, no style sheet, nothing! In a strange way – it’s not a bad idea. We have done a couple of brochure sites where each & every web page consists of a one-column, two row table and two PNG files. It can be done and the pages display perfectly on every platform we’ve tested them on. Try it – you might be surprised – One very important caveat! If you do a site that is all images – it’s very important to describe, keyword and metatag that site so search engines will know what to do with it.

One other caveat is that this design technique is only appropriate for the type of content that rarely, if ever changes. One example we did was for a personal trainer → and then, in turn, linked a menu choice to a google sites blog so that she could have a beautiful ‘brochure’ and a platform to easily update.

Some day our prince will come to give us platform independence. Some day. Real Soon Now. For now, we have clients to satisfy.•

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