There are some fantastic tips here for those cases when a separate mobile site is called for. Lovely work, Sarah, and thanks for sharing.
However, I’d like to call out one small point:
The trouble is, regardless of what you have carefully selected to be display:none; in your CSS, the iPhone still loads everything in the background; all that large imagery for your full scale website also takes up valuable mobile bandwidth and time.
Personally, I’d argue that if you’re using media queries to simply hide significant chunks of markup to different classes of users, then you really are better serving up a separate document.
But media queries, whether used on a responsive design or something more rigid, are ideal for projects when the content has been carefully considered as appropriate for all classes of users, regardless of the device. I’m working on a very content-rich redesign that requires a responsive approach, and it’s, well, geekishly exciting to see the content carefully and beautifully formatted on the myriad devices and browsers that access it. All with some careful planning, a thoughtful design, and a responsive execution.
Anyway. Just wanted to throw a quick note out there that media queries and @display: none@ don’t necessarily need to go hand-in-hand. (Which I realize you probably said somewhere, but I’m tired and oh look a shiny thing.)
Ethan
There are some fantastic tips here for those cases when a separate mobile site is called for. Lovely work, Sarah, and thanks for sharing.
However, I’d like to call out one small point:
Personally, I’d argue that if you’re using media queries to simply hide significant chunks of markup to different classes of users, then you really are better serving up a separate document.
But media queries, whether used on a responsive design or something more rigid, are ideal for projects when the content has been carefully considered as appropriate for all classes of users, regardless of the device. I’m working on a very content-rich redesign that requires a responsive approach, and it’s, well, geekishly exciting to see the content carefully and beautifully formatted on the myriad devices and browsers that access it. All with some careful planning, a thoughtful design, and a responsive execution.
Anyway. Just wanted to throw a quick note out there that media queries and @display: none@ don’t necessarily need to go hand-in-hand. (Which I realize you probably said somewhere, but I’m tired and oh look a shiny thing.)
Thanks again for the article!