Web Standards and Cell Phones

At Heston Liebowitz Design, we always use web standards. Although the average surfer on his desktop probably can't tell the difference, it allows a diverse array of other "non-traditional" devices to access the site as well. With little or no modification to the underlying code, a web page can be accessible to screen readers for the vision impaired and small-screen devices such as cell phones.

This multi-use code is possible because web standards allow us to separate structure from presentation. A simple metaphor should make this more clear. Image a car that comes with "snap on" colors. In other words, you can change the color of you car simply by switching a simple component. Now imagine that the snap on color is actually the whole design of your car. By switching one component, your car could look like Hummer or a Prius. Now replace "car" with "website" and "component" with "stylesheet." By switching stylesheets, we can completely change the design of a website. This is the beauty of separating structure from presentation on the web.

What does this have to do with cell phones? If you've ever viewed your favorite website on a cell phone's tiny screen, you'd know that it probably didn't look very good. In fact, you're lucky if you were able to read anything at all. This is because most websites have their presentation wrapped up in the structure. Although they look fine on a big-screen desktop computer, these types of websites usually look like crud on a tiny cell phone screen. Because most sites can't change the design based on what device its showing on, everyone gets the same thing.

This isn't the case with sites utilizing web standards. With a special stylesheet, we can target cell phones and serve them a cell-phone-friendly design that looks perfect on a tiny screen. And, this can be done without changing a single line of code in the existing website. You heard right. We don't need multiple versions of every page for them to display correctly on both desktop computers and cell phones. Don't believe me? Load this exact page in your cell phone browser and see for yourself.

All of this translates to significant savings. Your website can reach the fastest growing sector of the Internet with almost no additional costs. If you're developing a website with Heston Liebowitz Design, we can add this functionality easily.

To learn more about HLD's web development services, check out our services page or contact us.