Mobile Version of the website

Can we have a version of the ROOL website adapted for mobile phones?
I have tried the ROOL website on my Fairphone, a ‘smart phone’, and the text is very very tiny, lets say nano text. It needs magnifying many many times to be readable and then you see only a small part of it. Try it and see.

I would support this. However, given the site’s size, I’d imagine there would be two approaches to this – the quick and dirty method (hide assets, change font size, rearrange the sidebar), or a more measured approach. Areas such as the forum will require a fair amount of tweaking to work properly on mobiles.

The quick and dirty may end up being entirely adequate for some parts of the site, but I’d imagine having a great user experience all round is paramount. And it needs to load fast. I’m using a three year old Blackberry, which doubles as a hand warmer when viewing resource heavy websites :-)

Not a problem on my eight year old 240×320 HTC phone. Having a decent browser helps, Opera Mini in my case.

Looks as good as a PC in an iPad Mini. That’s usually how I come here now (no waiting forever for the antivirus, Firefox, and a dozen other things to apply updates to their internals).

Is also usable on an 848×480 Android mobile using the stock browser. You have to squint a bit as the screen is small, but it is clear. On my phone, at least, one can pinch out to zoom.

I have tried the ROOL website on my Fairphone, a ‘smart phone’, and the text is very very tiny, lets say nano text. It needs magnifying many many times to be readable and then you see only a small part of it. Try it and see.

Works fine on my Android phone, which isn’t exactly high spec. It’s easier in a decent browser (such as Firefox) which has the ability to zoom in to areas of text, than the default Android offering, but I could read this site just fine in both.

I assume that the “Fairphone” is running a sufficiently clean version of Android 4.2 that you can install your own apps on it?

It has Android version 4.2.2 and kernel version 3.4.5.

Even with high resolution, tiny text is not going to be readable.
Many commercial websites have mobile versions and so there is a demand.

I think the ease with which it can be done depends a lot on the back end.

Compare regular: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20141128
With “mobile”: http://www.heyrick.co.uk/blog/index.php?diary=20141128&keitai=1

Thankfully as the content is built in a more traditional way (styles give attributes, not markup and layout), it was a simple matter of switching the header and footer content for something adapted to mobile phones. The rest, such as the image scaling (it is a reduced scale rather low quality (60% if I remember) JPEG designed to send and load quickly on low bandwidth networks like EDGE) was done with php on the fly as the main content was loaded and sent.

Something very important to remember is to always provide a method of accessing the desktop version of the content. Some mobile devices are quite capable of doing it (and some do a better job than the likes of MSIE!). So if you use browser sniffing to determine which version to sent, don’t make it a fixed choice. Mobile invariably means reduced functionality, so at least let the user trade off what they want to do.
Something else to remember is that not all mobile devices are “tiny”. My blog scales assuming about 320px horizontal as that worked best on my three Android phones. It looks pretty weird on an iPad, but that said an iPad is quite capable of dealing with desktop style content even though it reports itself as a mobile device. I’d imagine the upper range tablets of other manufacturers would be similar, and given that Android can run a build of Firefox…