As a Web developer for the iPhone Life site, one of the projects on my to-do list is to make this site iPhone-friendly. That sounds like it would be a top priority, but what with one thing or another it's been delayed. Probably the most influential excuse is that the mobile Safari browser does a pretty good job of navigating the site without any adaptation. But now it's becoming a top priority, and I'm realizing, I don't know which way to go about it would make the most people happy. So I'm asking you!
One option (shown above) would be to keep the existing layout, but specify the viewport so that mobile Safari would start out showing you just part of the page instead of the whole page. As you can see, in landscape mode, the page is already readable at this size. All the ads are still there, which makes our advertisers happy; you just have to scroll to see them. Subsequent pages could have the viewport focused on the central column, so you could get straight to reading blogs or whatever without zooming in.
Another option is to use a completely different layout when showing our site to iPhone users. This is the strategy sites like Facebook use ... even though there's a Facebook app for iPhone, when you go to Facebook in Safari, you get the iPhone-optimized site. Since there will be an iPhone Life app available in the next month, we're in a similar situation. The home page would probably just be a menu, with options similar to the ones you see across the top of the page: Blogs, Current News, Apps, Tips, Best Sites, and so on. Each page would be reduced to one column. Ads (which are necessary to our budget) would have to be resized to fit that width.
So the question is, what do you prefer? What do you want to see first when you come to our site with mobile Safari?
I'd vote for the latter
Hi, Ben. I've just been going through our Best Sites directory looking at the sites on my iPhone (in order to identify iPhone-friendly sites for our new app). I found that I tended to prefer the latter approach. Here are the sites that will be part of our iPhone-friendly directory in our app:
The iPhone Blog
Just Another iPhone Blog
Apple iPhone School
iPhoneDoze
iPhoneWorld
Apple iPhone Apps
iPhone Atlas
iPhoneFreak
iPhoneLife app
Hi Ben - I like the approach taken by huffingtonpost.com. They simplify things so there are quick links to the most recent posts. Before we had the huffpo app it was almost impossible to click on links to read more of a blog without launching some other link.
Adding posts on a daily or even hourly basis (which could include the web version of iPhoneLife articles) might make it one of our go-to apps to find out the latest rumors and reviews.
Ben, I like the iPhone
Ben,
I like the iPhone optimized site layout, somewhat for the aesthetics but from a practical point people who don't use the iPhone or are trying to get information will use the full web site. But for those who have acclimated to - no pun intended - an iPhone life, the iPhone optimized layout feels more natural and gives a certain sense of respect for the device and people who use it.
Just my 2 cents, keep up the great work!
Thank you for the feedback,
Thank you for the feedback, John! You may be wondering what the holdup is in making the site more iPhone friendly, since I asked for feedback in April. My excuse is simply that other projects have been more pressing... my to-do list is literally two pages long. If we were hearing from more people more often that the site needs to be more accessible to iPhones, thenit would be a higher priority.
I'm also posting to test whether links in comments are being made live -- it's been reported that they're not. So here's a link to the iPhone 3GS / 3G / Palm Pre speed test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGof1tPqIBE