New Release: Mobile version, shapes & more
Well we thought we’d have this out last year, and then we tried to do it a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re finally live with a WebEden release to get really excited about.
The developers have been working flat out on this release since early last year – we let them out in the sun for half and hour in September but they’ve been locked back in their windowless room ever since. Because this is a big project. We’ve had to rewrite some of the central parts of the WebEden system in order to integrate the mobile HTML roadmap (released now), the new Blog (released shortly) and e-commerce features (after that, not long).
Mobile HTML version of your website
We’ve now created the technology that will simultaneously publish a full Flash version of your website (for desktops and laptops), a desktop HTML version (for those people who haven’t installed Flash), and a mobile HTML version optimised for the small screen.
Here’s a desktop version of a site:
And the same site on a mobile phone:
The mobile optimised version your website is rendered in a single column of HTML. This means that all your content appears as a long vertical column which is easy to read and allows the user to scroll down the page. The website navigation is by a roll out menu, which means that most of the screen is devoted to your content.
This is just the first version of the mobile HTML – we’re going to be improving and upgrading it over the next few months. If yours is a website where you think the mobile version isn’t placing your content in the right order, please let us know and we’ll add it to our test cases.
In future, we’ll be adding styling options for the mobile version that will allow you to customise it.
TAKE NOTE: If you’re looking at the HTML version on your mobile and find a page with no content on it, just press refresh and it will display the content correctly. The ‘empty page’ will only occur the first time a page is visited following the release. It will happen only once. It will not happen for all users.
New Shapes Widget
The exciting new shapes widgets lets you apply fills, gradients and effects to lots of different shape objects, usefully allowing you to customise the basic design of your website. Shapes is a project that’s going to be added in the next few months – we’ll be letting you apply these effects to text boxes, the blog, and images.
Option to turn off background to give a very cool design
There’ now a feature which lets you turn off the Flash background of the site. In its place you get the HTML background. Doing this makes it possible to do the full screen image / fluid web design style that is so in vogue right now, with big headers and footers.
That’s it for now.
As we keep banging on, we’re shortly going to be releasing the blog and e-commerce. We’re just sorry they can’t all come at the same time.
We really want to know what you think of the new release, and would love to see the new designs that you can come up with using shapes and backgrounds. Please leave us a comment below and let us know what you think.