Webinar Q & A
Instructor: Amy Gahran
Asked by: General
Q: That URL: http://bit.ly/LocalMobileSurvey, doesn't seem to be working
A: Both of the bit.ly links are case-sensitive, and should be all lowercase
Asked by: Pam F.
Q: Is there info about how best to display news coverage on smart phones?
A: That's a very broad question which depends on several factors:
- What kind of content? (just text stories? Photos too? Captions? Audio? Video? maps? interactivity? comments and sharing allowed? etc.
Generally a smartphone-friendly web design displays page elements (including content) in a single column, vertically stacked, easily readable at about 320x480px (but there is considerable debate about that: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-pixel-identity-crisis/). Include a few well-chosen action-focused navigation items -- that is, not links to all your sections from every page, but navigation such as "share" "save for offline reading" "comment," etc.
Avoid Flash. Just don't use it, don't link to it. It doesn't run on many mobile devices.
Like I said, ultimately responsive design is a better approach than having a separate mobile site or theme (which ultimately is a losing game, you can't keep doing that for every new device form factor). How do you make that happen? Here's a good resource -- intended for web designers, but it lets you know how it works: http://www.onextrapixel.com/2012/04/23/responsive-web-design-layouts-and-media-queries/
Asked by: Lisa R.
Q: Got stats on race or class or formal education level on who owns smartphones?
A: See PewInternet.org, their mobile research is great.
Asked by: Lauren S.
Q: You talked about text alerts, but what about push alerts? I work at a newspaper and we recently gained the capability to send iPhone push alerts to people who download our app. How does the protocol for sending push alerts differ from the protocol for sending text alerts?
A: I'd stay away from them, they mostly just annoy people. Really: don't you hate it when apps on your phone keep nagging you?
If you must include push alerts, make sure they are turned off by default. Having apps automatically start nagging you, and then having to hunt around to figure out how to disable the nag, will deeply annoy people. It's ok to offer them a pop up once or twice asking them if they want to activate this feature, though.
If you do offer push alerts, it's a good idea to make them customizable -- people can get only certain kinds of stories (by section, tag, keyword, etc.) or only top level breaking news, etc.
Asked by: Irwin G.
Q: If posting links to Twitter, are we better off using links to M. story locations vs. the full site?
A: You're actually better off having a single responsively designed site, rather than a separate mobile version.
But failing that, make sure you have "auto-detect" scripts on your web server that detect the useragent field in inbound web traffic. This indicates what type of device the user is probably using. Then your server will try to route that visitor to the appropriate version of your page. So if traffic comes in to m. pages from laptop users, they'll get the laptop version. And if traffic comes in to your full site from smartphone users, they'll get the mobile layout. Hopefully. Usually it works that way. For now. But like I said, some things about how web servers work might make this wonky -- so converting to a responsive design should be a high priority to avoid this mess.
If you have auto detect scripts implemented on your server, it really shouldn't matter much which version of your pages you send people to. If not, then I'd send them to your mobile layout -- with an obvious link up top on the destination page that says "switch to full site," which sets a cookie and remembers that preference in the user's browser. Better to do that than to force mobile users to load your full site.
It's a bit of a hack, but people will get something that works for them either way.
Asked by: Veronica V.
Q: Can you say again the name of the software that resizes the sites? It got cut off.
A: It's not software, it's a design strategy called responsive (sometimes adaptive) web design