So about a week or so ago one of my favorite and possibly the most popular technology blog on the internet went through a fairly major redesign. Kudos to the team at AOL/Blogmsith on the clean design it looks amazing. Ditto the fluid layout, it is nice to be able to see gadgets in their full glory. The site truly shines on my 22" monitor at work. But the the redesign is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. In fact in my opinion, it actually took a small step backward.

That small step that I refer to is the sites ineffectiveness at scaling down to the handheld or mobile size. Know I realize that the site probably looks good on the iphone, I haven't surfed it on the touch yet but just about any site looks alright on it. The problem is with Opera Mini on my blackberry. The text scales down nicely, readable and clean...the problem lies in the images. In order to see the eyecandy associated with the post I have to scoll to the right. I realize that the iphone has all the press but I would assume that many dumb phones and quite a smart ones utilize opera mini.

What he failed to mention is that the vast majority of the mobile market--around 95%--is made up of cheap units euphemistically described as “feature phones.”
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/BEC05CE1-D5EB-4E48-B46C-...

Hopefully the folks at blogsmith get this all squared away sooner than later. I don't do a ton of browsing on my blackberry but I do enough to know that it pissed me off to see the mobile version of the site take a step backward.

Every day that passes we step closer towards removing the tether and true handheld computing on our telephones. It is odd to see such a major property misstep. Any major re-design at any size site would do well to make sure that they are building a standards compliant site that scales well to the handheld/phone.

Design for the future but don't forget about the "Right Now".

Update: just confirmed on the touch, site formats perfect. I wonder if the server logs show more iPhone browsers than other mobiles?