Web Design For PDF - Phone Browsers.

[greeneagle]

Recently my site’s PDF – Phone Browser traffic has been increasing to the point that I now average 26-35% traffic right behind IE stats (Way out in fron of Opera and Firebird). I have never designed specifically for phone browser traffic, but with these stats, it has to become a strong consideration.

Different phone browsers use different rendering methods; including and not including horizontal scrolling features. Some can also view png (portable network graphics) and bmps (bitmaps) along with traditional gifs and jpgs.

Here is a list of features one new phone browser advertises:
•HTML interpreter, displaying pictures (JPEG, GIF, PNG and BMP), forms, server-side and client-side image maps
•Cookies (removed when the application is closed)
•SSL support (secure web sites)
•Easy and intuitive one-handed navigation
•A dynamic, 300 kB cache to speed up browsing and reduce network the amount of network traffic
•The back button remembers 30 last visited pages
•Up to 1000 bookmarks (a maximum of 5 in evaluation version)
•English and Finnish versions. The installation file contains both versions
•Small in size!

Doing a Google search for :
“web design for phone browsers” – exhibited no matches
phone browser web design – wasn’t very helpful

I imagine it would help to design with the following thoughts in mind:
1) narrow graphics only.
2) locked down vertical navigation bar tables or collapsible horizontal navigation schema
3) collapsible main content table

Is it best to detect and send to a fully compliant page (Whatever compliant is) ?

Any input would be appreciated!

Thanks,
Ken

[ranjan]

Opera has a builtin small screen simulator(F11 I think toggles between small screen and regular). My advice to you would be to check your site on opera small screen and decide your strategy for change

[greeneagle]

Thanks ranjan,
I did not know that Opera had that feature.
Ken