Professional Mobile Web Development with WordPress®, Joomla!®, and Drupal®

Chapter 9. Designing for Mobile Devices

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Learning about some important philosophies to consider when adapting your online presence and brand for a mobile audience

• Client-side techniques to help adapt your site's appearance for different types of mobile devices

• Considering ways you can also use logic on the server — or in the cloud — to perform a similar task

In this chapter, you will look at some trends and techniques for designing sites for a range of mobile handsets. "Design" generally means the visual user experience and interaction that is made available to the user on a mobile device, rather than the architectural design of the site as a whole, which has been discussed elsewhere.

The most important point to make at the start of this chapter is that design is, of course, a highly personal and creative activity. Every site is different, and designers, site owners, and brand owners are all involved in the process required to design and implement the user experience of a site. Mobile is no different, so this chapter doesn't set out to show a unique way that a site should be designed; it merely suggests the sort of topics that should be discussed and considered when bringing a beautiful mobile service to life. We would be straying well from the main topic of this book if we were to start talking about the aesthetics of effective graphic and user interface design.

In fact, at the time of writing, it sometimes seems as though there is remarkably little novel thought ...