Regular visitors to this blog (which posts less regularly than you deserve) will have noticed I change designs regularly.
Normally I choose a design that intrigues me, or that might allow me to experiment with something new. However this doesn’t always help you, the real “customer” of this blog.
After reviewing the visitor stats I have settled on this as the new look, and I don’t plan on changing it for a while.
The main advantage of this new look is mobile or rather smartphones and their related devices. It look pretty good on both a normal browser and a mobile sized screen, with easy to focus on areas for the good old (new) double tap to zoom.
Why not a truly mobile theme? These turn a site into rectangles that expand as you interact ( see wiki on your phone). Basically I hate them… Part of the point of a website is to show people things creatively, the standard ways of making a site suitable for smartphones seems to be to strip everything away.
Nowadays with relatively generous bandwidth limits and 4G networks around the corner the Internet should be used as it was intended.
Exceptions… Yes only one though – online payments – a nightmare on a normal site it’s extremely painful on a mobile device. If we want people to interact outside of an “app” store we really need to sort that, so far amazon seems to be the only online retailer where repeated purchases are a breeze. Luckily for me I don’t need to take payments , unless you think I deserve money for this sporadic essay writing.

Talking about mobiles and other devices, after a couple of weeks of using an iPad, many mobile sites think I need a washed out dull experience, however the iPad is not a phone, it has a better resolution than many laptops, and even high-end screens.
This means you really want an iPad to see your site as you originally wanted it to be seen – so don’t hide it…. the only thing that really does not work on the iPad are sliders, and that is now on a minority of sites – there are ways to get them to work and when they work – it works fine. The iPad is arguably what mobiles will end up being.

Small screens are only here for a short while, 5 years ago no one really thought larger screens than the maximum 320 * 240 arenas that used to be used would be improved to the resolution and size of a modern phone. With glasses like google’s Augmented Reality project possibly becoming available, the screen real-estate will expand to those devices. Flexible displays are also getting closer, so soon we will be able to expand displays larger than default sizes, already you can send your smart phone screen to a tv or other devices – this may become the default way of viewing data, an the smaller screen used only when truly mobile (which is not when most phones are now used!).

Anyway that’s my rant and opinion made public – read it and ignore at your peril.