How to make mobile page fit on the screen once open? - html

I need to put together website for mobile devices, so iPhones and various androids. The problem is I struggle with getting viewport right and other settings. My goal is so webpage would be coded for specific width e.g. 640px wide. Then once open device would zoom it in/out to the width of the screen so everything became larger or smaller same like after zoomig in/out via pinching on the device screen.
So I would like to develop it for lets say 640px width and depending on device it would scale up or down once open. So if device screen would be 960px wide it would automatically scale to this width via viewport somehow. Is this possible at all to have it coded for predefined width in css and have zoomed in/out as needed by device itself?
I apologize if the question is too generic, will explain details if needed.
EDIT:
So the most common approach if I understand correctly is to provide few layout versions for most commons screen sizes? Using media queries in css provide different values for widths, fonts sizes etc is that right?
If I decide however to go with percentages rather than media queries, given the design provided I think still would have a problem with resizing fonts as layout has images with text in it and text needs to be proportional to the image. Also percentages would take care of widths, height might be an issue though as the images would have to be resized vertically too. Some parts of the design would need to "fit" each other it seems and it would become problem I think.
Now if I simply build a website of certain width, lets say 640px I should be able to position everything on the screen with pixels, no diffeent from normal non-mobile website.
So I tried to set <meta name="viewport" content="width=640"> and inside of a page set width of widest container in css to 640px making page width 640px basically. If I understand correctly it will set up viewport to exact width of the page. So the page would be build as any other non-mobile webpage. User will have to adjust scale by pinching as when the page opens it is usually zoomed in/out for some reason. Is my understanding of what is happening here correct or is there some problem with it. Having it predefined size takes care of different mobile screen sizes as viewport is always same, fits into page width and only scale seems the problem, that is unless I'm missing something here.
I also should have mentioned that I need to do only portrait and make it only option, so no landscape view (that will be another question).
Would love to know your thoughts and I appreciate all the answers so far.

This is called Responsive Web Design when a website adjusts according to screen size...
You can make this kind of responsive website easily through CSS3 Media Queries:
How to write CSS Media Queries for common types of devices
Responsive Web Design: What It is and How to Use It
If you google for Responsive Web Design you will find lots more information on this topic. It's really an amazing method to make your website look great on all devices from small to large screens.

We have a series of tutorials on creating web pages using responsive web design. If you want a quick introduction to it checkout Introduction: Creating a Responsive Web Design, it lists common mobile phone and tablet sizes, so it might lead you to the answer you need. You can find the link to our tutorial series in the article. The solutions provided use Bootstrap in order to provide easy to create pages. And it also provides free samples of responsive web design pages.
I hope this helps to provide the answer that you need, if not, then please let us know if we can provide any further assistance.
Regards,
Arnel C.
InMotion Hosting Community Support Team

Specify the width in percentage say width=100%,which automatically adjusts the width with the screen.

Related

Page sizing issues HTML

I am currently trying to build a personal profile page. It's a work in progress, and I know little HTML, but I'm getting there.
I'm having an issue with my webpage with regards to how it scales with changes of the browser window size. On my (quite wide) screen at university, it looks fine. However, reducing the browser window size manually - or simply viewing it in a full size browser window on a smaller screen - appears to mess everything up - it doesn't look very nice. Text goes close to my pictures, and it all looks a bit tatty.
I think this is probably because my design is quite poor.
1. Is it because my design is bad or is there something else I'm doing blatantly wrong?
My current idea for a solution is to resize things so that they would look more reasonable on a smaller screen (i.e. on a normal sized laptop). I'm worried that this might end up making things look a bit odd on a bigger screen, though.
2. Is it possible/within reason for a beginner to have two different designs, one for smaller screens and one for big screens, which could be detected and then utilised depending on what screen size viewer is using? Should my page be designed to simply work with whatever screen size?
3. If I do reorganize the page such that it works better with smaller
screens, is there a way to "lock" this design in place, so that it
doesn't get messed up if someone views my page in a wider window?
Perhaps a way to ensure that only the boundaries of the page increase
in width?
What I'm essentially asking is how I should go about designing my page in order to resolve the evident issue - where the issue is that it looks rubbish when the browser window is any smaller than the max size of my screen at university.
You've created your page using tables. It is not a good practise nowadays exactly due to the problems your are facing. In practise, tables should not be used for layout purposes.
To make your layout fluid it'd be better to develop using div with float and relative positioning.
You can see another discussion related to this topic here
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/6036/why-arent-we-supposed-to-use-table-in-a-design/6037
You could use css property #media, to handle different styles for different screen width: https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/css3_pr_mediaquery.asp

Content inside of div disappears when resizing browser

I'm having a problem with a website I've built: whenever I view the site on a smaller monitor or when I resize the browser window, the content gets covered by the other divs. I need the content to be fully visible, no matter what size the browser is.
http://sophisticateddesign.nl/cfreport/overons.html
Also, on the homepage the text gets cut off a little bit on the bottom row when I resize the browser. I need this row to increase in height a bit, which apparently can't be achieved by simply increasing the divs' height.
http://sophisticateddesign.nl/cfreport/index.html
You should take a look at responsive web design. By using a fluid grid together with one or many media queries you can achieve what you're asking for.
Here's a good introduction if you'd like to get started. I can also highly recommend Ethan Marcotte's book about the subject!
The simplest way is not to define widths in pixels but using only width in %. You defined for example width: 960px; for <html> so if the browser window is less than 960px the whole content of this site won't be visible. You also defined the footer width and probably some more elements.
But the true is nowadays you should learn rather Responsive Web Design to create your page adjusting to device width. Many sites are being used by people on PC, laptops, tablets and mobile phones and you cannot create complex site to look nice on all those devices without using responsive design techniques.

How to design websites for all display sizes

I like to use a lot of unique graphics on my pages, which often results in making different page sizes depending on available screen width/height.
Here are two examples:
http://www.uvm.edu/~areid/homesite/ - the image floats at the bottom of my screen but on a larger browser, the image floats near the middle making it look off. It looks best when the bottom of the window aligns with the bottom of the image
www.stevenlebel.com - it loads two different pages depending on what monitor size is detected.
This seems like a lot of redundant coding. My question is, how can I make sliced/Photoshop images transition well to different screen sizes. Does Photoshop allow you to make DIVS instead of tables?
Can i make each of the slices created by Photoshop grow/shrink when the browser window size changes?
If anyone has any input on creating websites like this I would be very interested to hear what they have to say.
Thanks
Katie
Using a combination of media queries with properly selected breakpoints, sprites or individual images, and even a library like foresight.js you can achieve the results you're looking for.
The media queries will allow you to set up your site for different screen groups with breakpoints set to cover most tablets, phones, etc. You could then load a different image version from a sprite or a separate image entirely. Finally, foresight.js will look at screen resolution and available bandwidth to load higher resolution images for retina browsers if so desired.
set the page size as
.page
{
width:100%
margin-left:auto;
margin-right:auto;
}
Take a tour on mediaqueri.es and find out how others have solved your problem and don't forget dribbble also. I think you know about web designing for PCs, others are smart phones, tablets and TVs. Get some basic understanding of the user interfaces of apps on mobile OSes. Read the Android Design, App Design Strategies for iOS and Designing UX for apps for Windows 8. After that I think you'll have a proper design to solve your question. Then learn about css3 media queries, start coding with html5boilerplate and start from the mobile design. Good luck!

Webpage dimensions based on user's screen resolution

Now that I've nailed how I want my website to look, I need a way to make it look good on any screen resolution. To make my life easier, I set static dimensions while I was playing with the design. The dimensions are set at 1040x690. At home I use 1920x1080 resolution, and my boss's laptop is on 800x600. The website looks either too big or too small.
I realize I can set things by percentage in my CSS to fix this. The problem is the webpage has images of varying sizes based on the dimensions of my design. How do I make the dimensions of my website dynamic without making it look bad with the pictures being sized the way they are.
This is called responsive design and is usually applied to re-formatting your layout for mobile devices. Formatting for different sizes is usually done using Media Queries which apply different stylesheets based on the user's screen size.
In general, sites don't make different versions for different resolutions of the non-mobile version and stick to common resolutions: generally 960-wide. The added complexity of supporting EVERY resolution is usually not worth it once you get into supporting different sizes of images.
In short, you CAN support various resolutions, but it's a lot more work. Consider your audience and make it work for the majority of people.
98% of people have a monitors larger than 1024-wide, so your boss is the odd one out.
See: http://gs.statcounter.com/#resolution-ww-monthly-201106-201206
You can try with media queries.
for example, something like this
#media only screen and (max-width: 1023px) and (min-width: 768px) {
div#container {width: 768px;}
}
Try this links
http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/responsive-design-with-css3-media-queries
http://www.danstorm.com/dan-storm-article-css-15.html
You are able to use CSS framework and prototype design called Foundation. You are able to find it at the follwoing URL:
http://foundation.zurb.com/
It will offer flexible and easy ti use design for your web page suitable for many devices and resolutions.
Yes you can do this by scaling your html division(i.e. area covered by HTML tag -whole site) by scale property of CSS.
CSS Provides property named scale which can scale the size(width x height) of any element in the document.
For example,
<div id ="t_div"></div>
Now we can scale the size of the division as follow:
#t_div
{
-moz-transform:scale(1.5,1.5); //for Firefox
}
Above code will increase the size of division by x1.5 .
you can use this property of CSS to scale your website's main Tag(<html>) to adjust size according to screen size.
Link given below describe in very thorough manner about how to apply this scale property dynamically to your site.
Here have a look at this. http://khuntronak.blogspot.com/2013/12/how-to-fixsolve-screen-resolution.html
Try adding this in the head section : <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width">

How does a framework like Blueprint CSS keep your site looking consistent from one screen resolution to another?

I've been told to look into using a framework like Blueprint or 960 for my CSS.
What I don't understand is how it makes a site look consisent even if two users have different screen resolutions.
How does that work?
They specify sizes using units that are not relative to the window size. So if the user has a wide window there is a gutter and if a narrow window, a horizontal scrollbar.
Resolution is irrelevant except as a limiting factor on the user's maximum window size.