To cater for the growing number of our mobile visitors, we have identified and implemented a mobile theme for our website. This new theme will complement the existing desktop theme and only be presented to mobile devices. The user experience for desktop computers will not be affected in any way. If you are a mobile user visiting mkica.org on your mobile, you won’t have to make any changes to your phone either, the experience is seamless. The system will automatically detect the device requesting the website and depending on its type, present to it the appropriate theme(Desktop or mobile). The advantages of a mobile theme are many, the obvious ones being the presentation of the content, the touch friendliness and the content being scaled to your mobile’s screen size correctly. Below, i will highlight some of the other features the theme has:
Slide-Out Panel
To utilize the mobile phone’s small screen efficiently, the theme has a slide-out panel(see screenshot below) that we have dedicated to the daily Prayer Timetable, arguably the most important resource on the site and one that visitors are likely to access frequently while on the move. This will allow a mobile user to quickly tap the screen and reveal today’s prayer timetable in a snap in a slide-out panel covering 80% of the screen and tap again to go back to the rest of the site. This can be very useful when you are out and about and need to quickly check when it is time for the next salah.
Dropdown Menu
Navigating pages can be a challenge on a mobile device. To overcome this problem, the theme sports a clever dropdown menu structure to avoid cluttering your small screen’s real estate. You can quickly jump to any page on the site using this menu. There are two menu’s just like the desktop site, one at the top and another at the bottom. Simply tap one of them to see a list of all pages and tap again to go to the page you require.
Infinite Scroll
As the number of posts(=articles) on the site grow, the theme will allow for infinite scrolling allowing the visitor to list all available posts listed according to their date, the latest post is listed highest and when you get to the bottom click Fetch more to load older posts until all available posts have been eventually fetched.
I Don’t like this, give me back the normal site
No problem. All you have to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and tap the link that says “Switch to desktop version” and you will be taken straight back to the traditional desktop site. You can also set your mobile device to permanently request for the desktop site so you avoid the mobile theme altogether. Different devices have different ways to set this so please read your devices user guide to achieve this.
Whichever way you prefer to access the site and consume its resources, we as a team are happy with it. This theme is simply an option and one that we hope many will find useful.