Responsive Design on 91Èȱ¬ Indonesia mobile site
Post categories: 91Èȱ¬ News,Ìý91Èȱ¬ Online,Ìý91Èȱ¬ World Service,Ìýmobile
| 17:02 UK time, Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Hello, I'm Phil Buckley, Executive Product Manager for Future Media News World Service, andÌýI lead the technical and delivery teams there.
I'm very proud that today we have released a in Responsive Design.
New look 91Èȱ¬ Indonesia mobile site
As far as I can find this is the world's first responsive website in an Asian language and one of the very first non-English responsive sites.
The Head of the News Product Chris Russell has blogged in detail about Responsive Design, a technology which tests your screen size and connection speed and then gives you the best possible experience.ÌýThis has already been adopted on our English language mobile News site and the new 91Èȱ¬ Indonesia site is on the same .
This technology is particularly well suited to the World Service sites. More than half the visitors to 91Èȱ¬ Indonesia come on a mobile phone and they come using an explosion of different handsets: last week alone there were more than 1,200 different phones using the site.
These ranged from the newest Apple smartphones to some Nokia feature phones with local manufacturers heavily represented including the magnificently-named and the rather more straight-laced .
In the olden days every single one of these would have seen our standard mobile view:
Old mobile view
But now each of those 1,200 phones will display the best thing they can manage.
Basic phones on poor connections will get an experience similar to ourÌýold mobile site, for example an image like this:
Image displayed on phone with slower connections
This is about 3 Kilobytes (Kb) and is very fast to download but heavily pixelated around the neck and shoulders of the North Korean soldier.
People on a faster connection with a bigger screen will get this image:
Image on faster phone
This is about 10.5Kb, is much better quality and will scale up to the size of your screen. This allows us to deliver a great experience across this huge range of phones.
Ìý
Coder James Lee tests his work on a Nokia C3 and other phones
Another real advantage of the new site is its speed. I have watched videos of people testing this in Jakarta and it is lightning fast, often at least as fast as sites hosted locally.
My career, such as it is, has been in technical and product development - I have no journalistic experience nor do I speak Indonesian.
However, one of the things which struck me during this project is what a fantastic site 91Èȱ¬ Indonesia is. I have been testing this site several times a day for the last month and it has amazed me how often there is something new and how interesting the stories look. The pictures are clear and high quality and the journalism seems well suited to mobile phones with short paragraphs and regular breaks. So I hope that our new site carries this content better than the old and gives it the presentation, speed and usability it deserves.
Do let me know your feedback - I would especially love to hear from Indonesian speakers - and whatever you do, let be your watchword.
Phil Buckley is the Executive Product Manager for FM News World Service.
N.B. This post was amended at 1515 on 6th December 2012. As Phil explains in his comment below responsive design does not explicitly test for correction speed.
Comment number 1.
At 5th Dec 2012, Shannon Coulter wrote:This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.
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Comment number 2.
At 6th Dec 2012, Barry McGee wrote:Congrats to your and your team Phil - performance is still the Achilles Heel of RWD in my opinion and great to see the 91Èȱ¬ leading the way in creating lean RWD solutions.
Interested to know about the your implementation of responsive images, is this documented anywhere?
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Comment number 3.
At 6th Dec 2012, Phil Buckley wrote:Hi all –
After some urgent emails from the tech team here, I just wanted to clarify and where necessary correct some of the claims I have made above!
Firstly, we have found some responsive websites in Japanese, at So perhaps I can amend my claim and say that 91Èȱ¬ Indonesian appears to be both the first responsive site in Indonesian, and also the first Asian language responsive news site. Very happy to hear if I have missed any further instances.
Secondly, the tech team tell me that we are not testing explicitly for connection speed: instead we provide appropriate images based on their screen size. This ensures users download the most optimised version for their device. So – rather than testing for connection speeds as I state above, it would be truer to say that feature phones get the low resolution image, and the bigger your screen size, the higher quality image you get.
Barry, thank you very much for your kind words. I hope the above answers some of it, but there will also be a post on the 91Èȱ¬ Responsive News blog ( shortly, probably over the Christmas period (we know how to live) which will give more detail on the solution.
Thanks all –
Phil
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Comment number 4.
At 11th Jan 2013, LiamJFord wrote:Congratulations to everyone involved - the site looks great. Great to see teams across the 91Èȱ¬ moving to the same platforms and systems.
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