Assignment #12

1. www.lds.org -- I chose this website because I like that they have a clean, simple design. They offer a large variety of content, links and tools on their site. By keeping the design simple, it doesn't compete with the content for your attention. However, even though it's simple, I don't think it's too plain. I really like the blue and white color scheme and how they use different values of the blue to delineate the areas of the site. I also really appreciate their subtle use of gradients to add visual interest to the background without overpowering the eye.
   
   From a development standpoint, I think (from what I can tell based on my limited experience/knowledge) that their coding seems to be very concise and clean. I viewed the page without the style and I liked that their content appears very accessible and organized. I also looked at the HTML coding via "view page source" and I could clearly see how they had implemented their style attributes (even though I wasn't looking directly at the .css file).
   
   I used my father's smart phone to look at lds.org to compare to the original site. It basically has the same formatting. I don't know a lot about using the internet with mobile devices; I haven't really jumped on that bandwagon just yet. One feature of the device I was using was that it basically fit the website to the screen. That meant that if I was viewing it in portrait mode then the typeface became too small to read and the links were very hard to access. I didn't have any difficulty when I turned the phone to landscape, except that the video content didn't want to load on the phone...
2. Computer Screen versus Smart Phone
   1. www.flickr.com -- The first thing I noticed when I looked at the mobile version of this site was that they had significantly pared down the style and navigation options. To me, it almost looks like a completely different site because they don't have the same layout or content. I think they took out too many options. However, the navigation for the mobile site was very easy to use.
   2. www.answers.com -- When I first pulled up the mobile version, it looked very different from the standard website. It was very simple and the style didn't seem to relate at all to the original. However, while I was looking over the home page, I noticed a link that allowed me to view a scaled version of the website the way it appears on the computer. I tried it our and it worked similarly to lds.org. Unfortunately, I cannot find a cooresponding link to take me back to the mobile version so, I am stuck with what I have. It's not a bad site. I don't like the banner ad on the homepage bacause it is much too large and obtrusive; on the phone, it takes up the entire screen so that I had to scroll past it to get to any actual content.
   3. www.hacc.edu -- The phone that I am using to view the mobile versions of the sites is a fairly new model. I have used an Apple iTouch in the past to surf the internet and it would scale whatever site I was on to the size and position of the screen (for instance, it would flip to landscape if I held the device sideways). I think it's interesting that my father's HTC phone uses similar technology to the Apple. When I looked at HACC's website, I was basically viewing the exact same thing that I could see on my computer. With all of the sites that I was able to look at this way, it was necessary to have the phone horizontal in order to read or navigate anything. That required me to scroll more to access the content but, it didn't seem like the scrolling was excessive to me.

I think the future of mobile internet use will start to look more and more like the HACC website or the LDS.org website. As devices become more compatible with browsers and css becomes more of the standard, we will see less and less that websites separate their online content from their mobile content.

Sara Chadwick