Some of the 3 website “breaking” due to the iPhone

As has happened already this year, the iPhone 4 is breaking websites.  Three have not managed to escape this.

An SMS & E-mail was sent out recently to several/all? of the “register interest” folk which has in turn caused a lot of traffic to the main 3 website.  3 have done a very good job of separating parts of their site so a lot still works without problem.

O2 & Orange have dedicated websites, on different domains just to handle the iPhone, this should mean they have kept downtime to a minimum.  O2 have also announced no online ordering until at least the end of July.

This is a very good example of what to do when expect BIG product releases.

  • Static websites perform very well, so remove the PHP
  • Setup a sub-domain with a site dedicated to this release
  • Plan ahead. Similar to 3, get different elements of your sites separated permanently, worst case scenario, only a small part goes down.

Using the 960 Grid System

Originally, the tutorials mentioned here, were going to include the 960 grid system.  After some thought weighing up the benefits on convenience, performance, future updates etc, I have decided this will not be used for the main site.

I will still do tutorials on designing & prototyping using the grid system but that is as far as I will go.

So what’s wrong with the grid system?

As a developer who is trying to build a site that performs well, write tutorials from real experience and allow myself to easily apply updates in the future things have had to change.

  • The grid system has a lot of CSS I will not personally be using in this site.  Granted I COULD remove this, but I could also create what I need myself.
  • Future updates…well I intend to actually improve the site as time progresses.  The design will evolve as more content in introduced to the site, 960 may not even be wide enough, however, the problem comes when needing to adjust column widths.  Using CSS on its own, you adjust the width of the 2 columns and your down.  Using the grid system, you need to go through the HTML adjust class names.
  • Without using the grid system I am also able to create another tutorial for site layouts.  The grid system is fairly self-explanatory and will be covered on the prototyping stage.
  • Fluid or expanded columns.  By default the 960 grid system does not support fluid layouts, there is a branch for fluid and elastic layouts, but at this stage I am not entirely sure how or what I want to achieve with this.

Dansette