nov 22
When starting a Mobile WebSite development, the most important thing you have to bear in mind is to preserve the User Experience. This is mandatory. Even though you would provide your visitors with the best features ever, the key thing is that your users have to find navigation easy and intuitive… Funny would be even better but before to get there let’s focus on the easy and intuitive ones.
In others words you even may have great ideas regarding features you wish to offer but beyond anything what’s important is that visitors use them! This is all good sense in a way but it is far too often forgotten by developers – talking about developers, the thing is before to start coding any line at all, you have to take some time to actually draw on a sheet of paper an advanced draft of what you wish to display. This is a key thing! Draw a couple of drafts and then finally try to imagine them on screen. Then wonder:
- Is it intuitive to browse from one category to the other?
- Do I find easy the reading?
- Am I being smashed by an outraging amount of information on only one screen?
- Do I really need to know everything I can see at a glance?
- Oh and actually, what do I see at a glance? If I take a quick look at my page – meaning less than 10 seconds – what do I remember seeing? You can always ask your colleagues to play that game which is a great lead to find out whether your layout does the trick and your colleagues see what you want them to see!
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nov 18
Develop once, display everywhere!
Beside your casual WebSite, you may want to develop a proper Mobile Service.
Whilst on one hand you first need to think what sort of usages you want your visitors to do with this dedicated service, on the other hand you have to bear in mind your content will be displayed through different technologies, WebBrowser etc.
Even though you’ll have developped something with an amazing look and great features, you will also soon experience some technical issues essentially due to the wideness of devices used to access your pages.
Mobiles currently in circulation (Backelite sources)
Then first question: Do you want your content to be accessible from any sort of devices one could be using? In other words, while you want your Mobile Website to look amazing over a new generation of devices such as an iPhone, how are you going to downgrade your Mobile Site for the older devices? What about next generation? How will you anticipate mobile phone industry innovations? On the left side is a figure which talks by itself… New generation mobile phones are much more used for browsing, however, many of cheaper handsets are still in circulation. As you can figure out here, there still are loads of different sorts of devices currently used. And for each familly you will have to think about the best solution to suit devices specifications and capabilities. Sounds like a huge work doesn’t it? you definitely want to provide former handsets which may have been the big sale at its time with information too. While developping a page per type of devices would be way too much work especially if you want it to stay up to date, BkRender, our solution we’re providing you with, consists of developping a single page in BKML and then: let BkRender optimize the rendering over up to 6.000 handsets so far! Else, you may want to consider learing dozens of technologies to be able to render your Mobile Site everywhere properly… With BkRender, there is nothing you’re going to need to learn furthermore than what you already know. Here are two examples of a pretty basic page as a first step and then a more complex page, with some examples of rendering for the 3 devices famillies.
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juil 27
Backelite propose BkRender, une solution de rendering permettant de développer son site mobile sur plus de 6000 terminaux. Autour du produit, Backelite propose différents outils afin de faciliter la création de votre site mobile. En effet, nous avons fait le choix du projet Contao – anciennement Typolight – (http://www.contao.org) comme solution de CMS (Content Management System) en PHP5 pour plusieurs de nos clients.
Suite à vos nombreuses sollicitations, nous venons de publier l’extension mobile en Open Source sur ce CMS qui permet de publier le contenu de votre site mobile pour BkRender.
Procédure d’installation :
- Installer le CMS Contao
- AIler dans le menu : “Install/update extension”
- Choisir “stable” puis choisir dans la liste l’extension “bkml”
- Valider les différentes étapes de l’installation (fichiers + base de données)
Vous devriez avoir la nouvelle entrée “BKML” qui s’ajoute dans le menu de gauche.
Plus d’informations sur la page de l’extension Contao :
http://www.contao.org/extension-list/view/bkml.10000009.en.html
N’hésitez pas à nous contacter pour plus d’informations sur ce module sur notre outil de support : support-bkrender@backelite.com
