Designing for Handhelds
There’s a nice article in the new :ALA: issue that deals with designing your site for small screen devices. Basically, they’re talking about cellphone and 
DA: browsers. Those types of devices sometimes have screens as narrow as 120px, and thus you have to be very careful when designing for that.
The article is really split between discussing general design suggestions (one column, font sizes, padding/margins, etc.) and some specific :CSS: notes. Luckily, most people will simply be able to use an alternate stylesheet to deliver a stylesheet specifically crafted toward the handhelds. This is something I certainly need to do myself for this site.
This is an older entry and as such, it may be by a guest author or contain formatting problems / extraneous code. If you notice something wrong with the entry, please use the Contact page to let me know the entry title and issue.
Comments
Well, I own a P800 and do at times use it to check my email through webmail. (dont trust the build in email function as it doesnt leave messages on the server)
But recently we were wondering who the female actrices were in the movie Dr. Zivago so I googled it on my phone!!
I also posted to my weblog replying to comments while traveling.
Dont do it all the time but it comes in handy when not near an online computer.
How often to people actually surf the web from thier handhelds? Honestly, i have no idea, i would like to see some statistics.
I do not own one myself, but i cannot imagine trying to do anything else from it but get weather, news, and e-mail. I would think, like cellphones, there are one or two services like this, and the rest are novelty.
Then again, many pdas are begining to include vga resolutions, and the ability to go horizontal on the fly, so perhaps it might not be a bad idea to make a css file for PDA devices. I just can’t see it being a must to improve ratings, or traiffic until there is a bigger demand to view regular webpages on a unit such as a PDA, and i dont see that happining until it is easier to ditch your laptop for the PDA.
Derek, what do you use your PDA for? Are you happy with it?
By Greg Ferrell on October 2, 2004 at 08:18am link