Development

An E-Commerce Must: Get iPhone-Friendly

{ August 13th, 2007 }

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Companies that want to maintain a position of great advancement need a comprehensive iPhone optimization strategy.

Imad Mouline of E-Commerce Times writes:

Web site owners need to optimize their sites for the iPhone so they deliver the same high-quality experiences that Mac and PC users enjoy.

Imad continues with seven tips for iPhone optimization:

First, the fact that a Web site works in a popular browser such as Internet Explorer or even Apple’s standard Safari browser is no guarantee that the site will work well on the iPhone. There’s even a chance the site won’t work at all. The iPhone’s browser is a special version of Safari just for the iPhone. It lacks, for example, support for Flash and Java, technologies heavily used on business Web sites.

Second, it has portrait and landscape modes offering two very different experiences of the same Web site. Third, iPhone users are often looking at less of a Web page than they would on a desktop computer — they will be doing a lot of zooming in and out. Fourth, the iPhone lacks the processing power of a desktop, meaning rich applications like those made in Ajax (which the iPhone does support) will challenge the device.

Fifth, users lack precision input control because their input tool is a finger, not a mouse. Sixth, the iPhone examines Web pages for carefully sized blocks that fill the screen when finger-tapped (that’s the zooming effect). Seventh, forms are tricky because they don’t always automatically summon the iPhone virtual keyboard.

Read the full post at MacNewsWorld.

Optimize Your Current Site for the iPhone - with One Line of Code

{ August 12th, 2007 }

Though Works On iPhone can redesign your current site to make it iPhone-friendly, there are a few quick and (relatively) easy things to do to your on your own to make it more visually appealing on the iPhone.

From Craig Hockenberry at furbo.org:

Want to make your site look better on the iPhone with one line of HTML?

It’s easy—just add a <meta> tag that lets the iPhone know how wide to display the initial page. I added the following code to the <head> in my template yesterday:
<meta name=“viewport” content=“width=808″ />
Every browser besides MobileSafari will ignore this information. But it does something very important on the iPhone: it optimizes the viewport for your content.

Click here to read entire article