Nielsen Full day training course offered at Usability Week New York City
How to Take Your Web Skills Mobile
Build on what you already know and get going on the mobile web
You're web-savvy already. Maybe you wield HTML and CSS with ease or design beautiful desktop sites. Now build on what you know to take your web skills mobile. Learn what goes into a wise mobile web builder's toolkit and how to choose the right tools for the right project. Get a heads up on what doesn't translate from the desktop world and avoid common pitfalls that can quickly turn a mobile experience sour.
After an overview of the device landscape and current trends in mobile web usage, we'll examine what makes successful mobile web site designs tick, including content-first thinking, Responsive Web Design and content adaptation. This course will show you how to get going successfully on the mobile web with minimal fuss, but also touch on newer and more advanced strategies for addressing some stubborn challenges still facing us.
Benefits
- Learn how to make web sites functional, comfortable, and handsome on as many devices as possible.
- Explore the different options for creating or adapting web sites for mobile devices and analyze different approaches for different projects.
- See what works and doesn't work on the mobile web, and avoid big headaches by mastering some straightforward, core techniques.
Topics
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The mobile web landscape
- Mobile web statistics and trends, globally and regionally
- Browser vs. platform vs. device
- Device constraints and characteristics
- Differences and commonalities on the pan-device web
- Successful mobile web sites and their characteristics
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Three options for the mobile web
- Adapting the same content and functionality for many devices
- Changing the content or functionality for different devices
- Doing nothing
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Common interface woes on the mobile web: desktop metaphors that don't translate well
- Click versus touch: hovers, taps and gestures
- Absolute or fixed layouts and positioning
- Form elements, frame and inline elements, scrolling
- Lightboxes, popups and JavaScript-driven effects
- Third-party content
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Core techniques for adapting common content and functionality
- Content- or mobile-first philosophy
- Responsive Web Design
- Successful mobile design patterns
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Core techniques for changing content or functionality for different devices
- Device detection and device databases
- Feature detection
- Serving different things to different classes of devices
- Image optimization
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A combined approach
- Building your toolkit and combining techniques
- Key foundational steps for making new or existing sites "mobile-friendly"
- Less is more: reducing complexity wherever possible
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Where things go wrong
- Performance
- Device idiosyncrasies and feature support issues
- The challenge of testing
- Device detection failures
- Asserting too much control; building too much complexity
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Advanced topics and challenges
- Images and media
- The confluence of native and web
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Using device capabilities
- Capturing media
- Location-based adaptation
- Offline modes
- Storing data on the client
Format
This course is a lecture format, with a few group exercises to help emphasize the core concepts. There will be ample time for questions and discussion.
Prerequisites
This course is targeted at web designers and implementors who are new to the mobile web, but who have some prior knowledge of core web technologies like HTML and CSS. Deep knowledge of programming is not assumed, but some examples include code, markup and technical concepts.
Instructor
Lyza Danger Gardner
Lyza Danger Gardner is a dev. Since co-founding Portland, Ore.-based mobile web start-up Cloud Four in 2007, Lyza has tortured and thrilled herself with the intricate ins and outs of the bazillion devices and browsers now accessing the web globally. Lyza and co-founder Jason Grigsby are the authors of Head First Mobile Web (O'Reilly).
Lyza Danger Gardner is a dev. Since co-founding Portland, Ore.-based mobile web start-up Cloud Four in 2007, Lyza has tortured and thrilled herself with the intricate ins and outs of the bazillion devices and browsers now accessing the web globally. Lyza and co-founder Jason Grigsby are the authors of Head First Mobile Web (O'Reilly).