Hi Jon,
No worries about not replying immediately - you made up for it with
the usefulness of the reply :)
I'd say the most important part of mobile design
is thinking about
mobile from the start. It encourages you to identify what the key
pieces of functionality that your website simply must surface are and
helps you build beautiful interfaces.
Wise words, I'm sure. While I'm not particularly interested in
mobile computing, it forcing me to think about deeper about
key functionality and flow for the design can only be a good thing.
Without a doubt going forward you will find media
queries useful:
http://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/
Thanks for the links. I always thought of using css media queries as
cheating somehow, but I suppose it makes sense to create actually
attractive and useful designs which can scale down elegantly.
I shall read up more on this stuff, and at the very least try hard
to make sure everything is basically usable. Long shot, but if
anybody wants to dive in to help, please do!
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Erudite
As for simulating a mobile device, thanks for the advice. I'm
running Debian Squeeze at the moment, so I'll have to update my
Chromium to get the developer tools with exciting device metrics
options - thanks for pointing that out.
There are various simulators you
can download so that you can test on iphone, android devices as well
as various mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile and Opera Mini that
you can test out!
What advantage would the 'various simulators' you mentioned have
over just using Chrome's metrics stuff? I just wonder whether it's
worth me setting that stuff up too?
Thanks again, very much, for you help.
Nick