Cornerstone Consulting

I have an amazon.com account and I buy Kindle books. I don’t have a Kindle, so I read those books on my iPhone or my iPad. And I share the account with my husband, so sometimes he buys Kindle books and reads them on his iPhone. Sometimes we want to read the same book, sometimes my daughter wants to read one of our books on her iPod Touch.

I don’t think we’re a particularly unusual tech family in this way. Now, bear with me for a moment while I explain my frustration with Amazon’s separate mobile site.

I buy a Kindle book with one-click. That means the book is sent to my default device which is my iPad because I can’t set the order of the list. It’s just alphabetical and I can’t rename my devices once I’ve put them in (another post topic perhaps).

So, the book goes to my iPad, but I read on my iPhone. I happen to be somewhere other than my computer when I fire up my Kindle app on my iPhone and see that my Kindle book isn’t there. No problem, I just need to go to amazon.com, to my account and send the book to my iPhone.

I open up safari, type in amazon.com and am redirected to Amazon’s mobile site. It does look nice on my small screen. I click on my account, log in and I can’t get to my digital downloads. They didn’t put that on the mobile site.

Now I have to click on the link to the real site, deal with the fact that it’s not designed for my device at all, and make my way down into my account to get my book on my iPhone.

The designers obviously forgot about all of us Kindle app owners (how many thousands of people is that?).

Why am I even talking about this? Because Jakob Nielsen recently posted his advice on mobile user experience. The summary is quoted below:

Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.

I completely agree with the first sentence. You do need to serve a different design to different screen sizes. But I completely disagree with the second sentence. Two sites means that one will almost always be a cut down version of the other. There is barely enough time to keep one site for a business up to date and working, how are we going to find the time to do two?

Wait a minute, this is giving me a huge sense of deja vu. We web designers have been through this before, back in the bad old days when we wanted pixel perfect layout and we had to serve a different site for different browsers. How did that work out?

We decided that was a waste of time and went against the very nature of the web. The whole idea is that we can publish the information once (the HTML) and we can make it look like we want for different users (the CSS).

That’s what responsive design is all about. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there.

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Naomi Beard and Associates

by Karen on April 4, 2012

Naomi Beard and Associates is a firm that provides coaching and consulting services to lawyers and law firms. The site is informational and includes a client only section where they can download resources and a forum for clients.

Since the site needed to stay up to date, we chose a WordPress installation and used the Thesis theme with some modifications.

Visit the site at naomibeardandassociates.com.

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Celiac.org

April 4, 2012

The Celiac Disease Foundation is a non-profit organization that works to increase awareness about the disease. The site is both informational and a way for users to find out what CDF has been doing with the money that is donated to them. Most visitors are looking for information on Celiac Disease and the first button [...]

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Gradillas Court Reporters

April 2, 2012

Gradillas Court Reporters is a court reporter company in Beverly Hills. The site is informational and needed to convey the sophistication of the firm. As many lawyers aren’t Internet savvy, we kept the site simple. We also made sure the text was easy to read. Visit the site at gradillas.com.

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Bouve.com

August 4, 2011

Bouve.com is an ecommerce site selling head scarves. It includes information on the product and an Interspire shopping cart. Visit the site at bouve.com.

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Anti-Virus Fun

October 1, 2010

Went to a client’s house the other day. He had been without email on his desktop computer at home for 2 weeks. He could check his email on his iPad and iPhone – but his PC just kept giving ‘timeout’ errors. After a lot of time spent messing around with Outlook settings, system and Outlook [...]

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Fun with Linked-In

September 29, 2010

One of the things I’m doing to try and get my name out there is answering questions on Linked-In. I hadn’t realized this was even on their site before I can go into their questions section and answer questions other people have posted. It’s fun and challenging, plus I have the hope that someone will [...]

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Finding Work as a Consultant

September 20, 2010

Consulting is a strange business. You’re only selling your time and expertise. So, my client’s are cutting back and downsizing, which means less work for me. How do I get new clients? Especially, when businesses everywhere are cutting back! Normally, I get all my new business through word of mouth and it’s a slow process. [...]

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I Love Data

August 5, 2009

Maybe it’s the scientist in me or maybe it’s the communicator (because isn’t raw data the very building blocks of communication), but I love data. Data on just about anything: animals, web trends, weather, etc. And put that data into a colorful, interactive package and what could be better? The NY Times did just that [...]

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Posting from my iphone

July 9, 2009

I’m trying out the wordpress iPhone app and so far I’m impressed. I can easily make a blog post and also see my recent posts and even check comments. Pretty cool. And in case you didn’t know this, you can just double tap the space bar on your iPhone while typing and it will put [...]

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