Making your blog iphone friendly

01.24.10 Posted in Usability, Web Design, Websites by Barry

Brows­ing web­sites on an iphone can be a lit­tle frus­trat­ing and any web­site which has a mobile iphone spe­cific skin adds a higher level of stickyness.

So how do you know if you know how many users are access­ing your web­site with an iphone?, Luck­ily most ana­lytic pack­ages will let you drill down and see the oper­at­ing sys­tem and browser type.

From Google Ana­lyt­ics, its Vis­i­tors > Browser Capa­bil­i­ties > Browsers and OS.

A very small per­cent­age are access­ing using the Safari/iPhone combo, but Wii, PS3 & ipod touch vis­i­tors make up roughly 10%, so enough to war­rant some configuration.

Access­ing my site with an iphone looks like this, which doesn’t ren­der too well as the width is too much and doesn’t zoom correctly.

Adding the WPtouch plu­gin, sets a mobile friendly theme for iPhone, iPod touch, Android, or Black­Berry Storm, with sup­port for the fol­low­ing user-agents: android, aspen, blackberry9500, blackberry9530, cup­cake, dream, incog­nito, iphone, ipod, opera mini, web­mate, webos.

Once installed it looks like this to mobile visitors.


Very easy to install and con­fig­ure, but makes a mas­sive dif­fer­ence — def­i­nitely one of the must have addi­tions for word­press users.

(I’ve used a mac app called Iphoney to test)


When NOT to use sIFR font emedding

11.20.07 Posted in Web Design by Barry

Web​.com have updated their web­site today, imple­ment­ing the much debated sIFR tech­nique to embed their funky font within the design.

While I think sIFR has a place for web design, I think this is a poor imple­men­ta­tion by web​.com, which is backed up dif­fer­ence in appear­ance in my 3 main browsers (on Mac OSX)

Opera 9

Opera

Fire­fox 2

Firefox

Safari 3

Safari

Only Safar3 man­aged to cor­rectly ren­der the jaggy font which is used through­out the web­site, Firefox2 & Opera9 both ren­der it as a green/orange blocky mess. This seri­ously affects not only the design of the site but also the cred­i­bil­ity, and also has SEO impli­ca­tions (although hav­ing a domain name like as web​.com can’t be too much of a bad thing)


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