I'm looking for tips, tricks and resources on optimizing a website design for Android's browser.
I'm building an Android app and some of the functionality will be accessible through a web interface.
I'm looking for tips, tricks and resources on optimizing a website design for Android's browser.
I'm building an Android app and some of the functionality will be accessible through a web interface.
I rely on two elements to optimize websites for mobile browsers (especially Android and iPhone):
Usually I want pages not to have a page width of 800 to 900 pixels, as the Android and iPhone browsers set it to by default. To have the page width the same as the device width, I set the following meta tags:
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, height=device-height, user-scalable=no" />
I adapt the design to the page width. For instance, having a 2 column content for large screens and 1 column for small screens and print. So I include into the main main css-file further css-includes with media queries:
@import url(style-screen.css) screen;
@import url(style-small.css) print, handheld;
@import url(style-large.css) screen and (min-width: 801px);
@import url(style-small.css) screen and (max-width: 800px);
I found it went a long way to add these two meta tags to my site:
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" />
<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="True" />
Here's more info on them: http://learnthemobileweb.com/2009/07/mobile-meta-tags/
Regarding jQuery, there is a version optimized for mobile browsers: http://jquerymobile.com/
dev.opera has some articles, not for android of course but for mobile web sites in general. For example:
Making small devices look great
Designing and Developing mobile web sites in the real world
As all mobile web pages keep every thing slimmed as mutch as you can..
I don’t know of any decent Android resources, but I wouldn’t go too crazy on the JavaScript. If Android is anything like the iPhone, (current) JavaScript performance will be much worse than you might be used to on desktops.