To be more specific, I have a single column Tumblr blog. I don't want to use a generic "mobile friendly" theme when someone hits it from a mobile device. I want the single column to fill the width without stretching the width of the content or making the font size larger.
Essentially, I want to "zoom" to the content without the user having to double-tap the screen.
You need a couple of things:
You need a mobile-only CSS file to change the stylings (usually simpler, with fewer or smaller images). You can use the "#media" tags to accomplish this. Here's a good article on this method: http://mobile.smashingmagazine.com/2010/07/19/how-to-use-css3-media-queries-to-create-a-mobile-version-of-your-website/
Make sure you use "meta viewport" tags to set the width of the page. This will properly "zoom in" on the text that you're talking about. It tells the mobile browser how wide the page should be. Here's more information on the topic (specifically for iOS, but the tag can be read by other mobile browsers): http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#DOCUMENTATION/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/UsingtheViewport/UsingtheViewport.html
You're going to have to use a special mobile friendly css if you want different behavior on a mobile browser. It doesn't have to be in a separate theme though.
You can preface a css rule with #media only handheld to make it target mobile devices with small screens only.
Give us your css and html and I'll give you a more exact answer.
Related
I have troubles regarding a slider I have on my website.
Currently it's a slider with the <img> element. Problem I encounter now is that on mobile the large images get loaded as well. Now I want to load specific (smaller) images for mobile so that my website is faster on these devices.
A solution I had was using the media queries in combination with CSS background image. This is perfect to use because I can load the images with CSS and thus can use media queries to select the image based on screen size.
But the problem is is that I want to add the images to the SEO, they are essential for my website and I read everywhere that if you have such images, you need to use the <img> element. So that the SEO can work and include these images in the content. Also I cannot add ALT tags to background-image.
Another solution is rendering two sliders, one for mobile and one for desktop, and hiding the slider you don't want to see. Problem I have with this solution is that both of the sliders need to render, thus decreasing performance.
Is there a solution that I'm missing here? In my understanding you cannot change images in a <img> element with CSS media queries.
You can use the picture element. As the Mozilla Developer Network says, "[This element] serves as a container for zero or more elements and one element to provide versions of an image for different display device scenarios". I think it does the trick. Here you are another good article that explains how to use this element to achieve the result you need with your responsive images.
The picture element is a really nice modern solution. But if you want something more cross-browser, consider an approach with JavaScript. My solution for some websites was using sets of images with regular suffixes, for example image.jmg, image-medium.jpg, image-small.jpg, and a script checking the screen resolution. In the HTML only small images are included, but if the script finds the screen is big enough, it updates their src with corresponding suffixes.
I'm using rails and bootstrap and I'm using the bootstrap carousel on my landing page. I found that on the mobile view the carousel starts to look quite bad unless I make the pictures much higher than wide.
I wanted to use an if statement in my erb file to check the viewport size and render the appropriate image. I don't think using media queries in css is appropriate in this case as the image size determines the size of the carousel (not simply a background image).
Sorry if this is a newb question.
Erb is rendered server-side, which really has no notion of the viewport size, you would need to resort to using javascript in conjunction with your code, to make the adjustment.
This seems like a perfect case for media queries in the css. This is a much cleaner solution than muddling around with js.
You can, in the carousel, draw both of the images. Give all the wide images a distinct class (wide-image, for example) and all of the tall images a distinct class (tall-image, for example). Then, in the appropriate section in your css, simply set the undesirable image class to display none, which will effectively leave you with only the appropriate images displaying (and governing the size of the carousel).
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.
I'm not familiar with responsive websites and would like to start creating a website taking all the screens into account.
Obviously media queries is the way to go but they only concern CSS.
In my current project, I would like to organise the page differently according to the width of the page (being completely device agnostic).
The thing is, on small widths, I would like the HTML layout to change completely so I will have to make the HTML "responsive" as well as it should change according to the website width.
How can I achieve that?
Is there any js library (jQuery if possible but not mandatory) that will "serve" another html page according to the width of the page?
The whole website should be build this way so the script should be more than a gadget, it should be rock solid enough to allow the whole website to rely on it.
And, of course, it should work on any device or screen or browser.
Some would say that I'm looking for adaptive techniques more than responsive ones but I believe it's a mix between those two as the elements will still be responsive in general but between some critical breakpoints, it will indeed adapt and change the html.
I read a lot about different techniques but I can't find something that suits my needs.
Any lead would be appreciated.
Thank you for your help.
What you are describing is adaptive delivery. What you want to to is detect the user agent string using a server side language, and then conditionally render your templates according to whether the device is a phone, tablet, or desktop. Realistically, you'll share a lot of code between the screens, but you might have a different navigation layout, or opt to not show more rich features on the smaller screens. This approach not only saves a bunch of hide/show code, but saves a lot of overhead on smaller screens where you would otherwise be loading stuff that would be hidden the entire time anyway.
You can do a lot with CSS and media queries to alter your page layout ("completly") depending on device and screen width. If I were you I would dig a little deeper through the possibilities these techniques can offer.
If you are positive this is not enough. I would look into Redirects and User-Agent Detection to redirect your users to a different page depending on the user-agent.
If you are looking for a full framework that can handle both what you need (redirecting and dynamic content depending on user-agent or width) and a whole lot more, you should look into AngularJS.
You CAN of course do some DOM manipulation with pure JS depending on your criteria, but as your project gets bigger you might be in for a world of hurt.
Is it possible you could use an existing CSS framework such as Bootstrap to achieve a responsive design across your various target browser widths and device types?
Bootstrap in particular will let you specify different layouts depending on the device width where the page is being rendered. More information here - adjust your browser width to see it in action.
If, after evaluating an existing framework, you're still determined to develop your own you can perhaps at least use the techniques in Bootstrap or another framework as a starting point for your own.
try Bootstrap
Bootstrap makes front-end web development faster and easier. It's made for folks of all skill levels, devices of all shapes, and projects of all sizes.
I do not know if it is sufficient to your project, but you can to some extent use CSS to control what markup you would like to show or hide on smaller or larger devices. For example:
<div class="mobile-only">
<p>This content will only be visible on small screens such as mobile devices</p>
</div>
<div class="tablet-up">
<p>This content will only be visible in tablet and larger devices</p>
</div>
/* media query for small screens, such as mobile devices */
#media screen and (max-width: 767px) {
.tablet-up {
display: none !important;
}
}
/* media query for tablet and larger devices*/
#media screen and (min-width: 768px) {
.mobile-only {
display: none !important;
}
}
But be sure that you do not use this technique if you have a really big project, you might be ending up choking performance.
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.