Hi all of you,
This is my most advanced website project ever:
http://www.harryniehof.com . He is a musician. Yes, this site was there before, but the site got a major update: making it accessible from every device possible (be it an Iphone, an Ipad, a Tablet, a PC, A Mac, an Android device, a Windows phone 7 device, Palm (or HP) WebOS, Nokia Symbian, whatever, at whatever screen resolutions.
The 'main' website is a Visual Site Designer website, a Dutch language website, so I hope you can navigate your way around. When you surf to this site, it detects what browser you have on what OS (at least I hope so :-)). Depending on this information it either loads the 'normal' site (the main site) or a site made for all kinds of handhelds except apple products, i.e
http://harryniehof.com/mobile , or a site made for apple devices only, i.e.
http://harryniehof.com/apple
The sub-sites (/mobile and /apple) are made with the Coffeecup HTML editor, and are made with a so called liquid or fluid design, which means the design adapts to whatever screen resolution. The main site has a fixed resolution (900 x 1100 pixels), but when you load the sub-sites intentionally and then you make the width of the browser smaller, you can see what I mean about what is a floating or liquid design. The design adapts automatically to the given width.
I had to do the sub-sites with the HTML Editor, cause VSD can't do liquid designs. It was a nice lesson, I didn't know CSS before, now i do a bit...
I had to do 2 sub-sites, one for Apple devices, and one for all other devices, because Apple refuses to use Flash. And the music on the main site is Flash music. I had to use Flash on the main site because Firefox can't do MP3, which is ridiculous (!), and Apple refuses to do Flash (ridiculous too), so I had to do the music with MP4 files (loads Quicktime) especially for Apple devices.
Maybe you wonder why I didn't do only two designs, one 'general' liquid design and one for Apple devices only. I started using VSD, as this software gives me far more (easy) graphic possibilities. And then I wanted to do a liquid design for ALL devices.
Something I learned: older Android devices (2.1 and earlier) don't do Flash either. So if you can't listen to the music while having an Android device, you'll have to upgrade to Android 2.2. Symbian devices (Nokia) have no problem. I don't know about all other smartphones, tablets, whatever might be out there. Please let me know if it works for you. Load the main site, please,
www.harryniehof.com and tell me if it loads the liquid design automatically for your Smartphone/Iphone/Ipad/Tablet. Thank you!
Cheers, John van Hulst
John van Hulst