Beta test: m.inthemix.com.au

I open the mobile site from my Nokia. Layout looks great, very easy to navigate, and content can be loaded at very fast speed.

Only criticism, where is the "what's on" section? Would be very useful if ITMers looking for a party while hanging out with friends on the weekends.

I was using iPhone and these are my thoughts:

What's already awesome:
1. Plenty of pictures which make the pages alive.
2. Related articles feature is awesome!

Errors?
I was looking at Glade Festival reborn article (in International) and clicked on the square pictures on the bottom of the article. It opened in a new window before it said "Page Not Found"? Also, these square pictures should have a heading (eg. "Event pictures") so people wont get confused as to whether these pictures are this event's pictures or links to related events or something else.

Maybe it would be good if these pictures could open on the same page using 'lightbox' method rather than opening a new window. Better yet, put all the picture thumbnails in one row and have left and right arrows for scrolling (or allow swiping gestures on touchscreen phones for scroll -- like Google Images! )

Other improvement suggestions:
1. The articles in the Headlines and Latest News are mostly the same. I think Headlines can be removed as it looks redundant.
2. When you remove Headlines, you have more space to add other sections such as Event Reviews (which I believe deserves to be in the main page).
3. I prefer to not have to click the "Menu" button everytime I need to do something. Maybe you can create some a menu bar which always "sticks" to the top/bottom (or possibly a floating menu which always moves to the top/bottom) with mini icons for faster navigation.
4. I would also like to see more sections being made available, such as: Upcoming Events, Competitions, etc.
5. With Upcoming Events, maybe we can integrate it to Social Networking such as Facebook Events, Twitter, and FourSquare?
6. Can you disable the ability to swipe the page to the left and right so it wont expose the browser's background? (If you see iphone.news.com.au you can see that when you swipe the page to the left and right, the page doesn't move).

HTC Desire here,

Overall the site runs very smoothly, as already said, once out of beta a redirect from the main site to the mobile site would be nice. On the Tron legacy feature page i had to reload it a couple of times because I was getting a red Page not Found sign. That could have been to do with my mobile net connection also.

I like the fact that you have a warning before you navigate to a part of the site that isn't optimised for mobile browsers.

Integration of the comment features on articles would be nice, as well as some of the other main sections of the site (events and competitions)

Navigating the forums worked ok, but if i clicked on the main heading for a forum section (special, rather than 12 days of inthemixmas) it came up saying that no posts had been made in that section. Not a great fan of the red text on a white background, makes it quite hard to read when outdoors on a mobile screen.

Other than those couple of things that need a bit of tweaking, for a beta release it seems to be running fine, works well with the way the Desires browser resizes the articles to fit on the screen.

+1

Its good.

aesthetically it leaves me wanting something more interesting to look at,

more interactive options (being able to like artists n festivals n the like)

Music/Video Streaming would be nice, or even access to free tracks

Would occasionally get "Unable to open page" when was trying to access forum (dunno if thats just my phone or not)

Love the making an app idea, opening up the option to get notifications on certain updates n news releases.

Nice work so far though, keep it up~

Hey All,

Loving the feedback.. Keep it coming.. A few answers for you on common questions or suggestions:

• The link between the mobile site and mobile forum is currently not complete. As some of you have noticed, they effectively act as two seperate mobile sites at the moment. We're working to integrate these at the moment to make it a more seemless experience and to fix the navigation.
• We're also working on implementing the What's On guide for the mobile site. It should be ready by next week (we're about 50% done).
• Logins will be better in today's release, but as many of you suggest, we may move this to be a persistent prompt on first load, so you can login and set your location once and then just re-use that information on your next visit(s).

thanks joe,

floating menu bar?

Are you serious?

Are you biggs?

On the floating menu bar.. we'd probably more likely do a footer bar with some controls in it. It's a little more complex and there are some cross browser issues with it, so we've left that alone for the moment.

I think you guys have done a good job with the first verion of the mobile site.
I like the simple layout of the pages and the consistency of it. No doubt more improvements will be on their way. Some people have already added suggestions relating to forums and logins but I have several suggestions for improvement in site navigation and adding some useful tools.

1. Use a layout to more easily distinguish which category page you are on: Local, International, Event etc. After clicking around for a while I found I lost track of where I am as all the pages look the same.

2. Consider maybe adding a direcroty indicator at the top of the page to identify where you are are to aid navigation allowing you to easily go to the parent directory/category and the home page.

3. I found that to go back to the home page you may need to click BACK a few time. I would suggest adding a HOME button somewhere at the top right corner. Even adding HEADLINES and LATEST ARTICLES to the main menu would be a good idea as currently they are on the home page.

4. Add a tool in the articles to enable to email the page to a mate if you see something interesting.

5. On the "Page not found" page there is a link called "return to the homepage" which returns you to www.inthemix.com.au. I would expect it to return me to the mobile site homepage instead.

5. Consider adding a PODCAST section as well.

6. Would be great to have a WHATS ON sections too just like on the main website which is the bit I most often use.

All in all love your work and keep it up
In other thoughts, we all love the main inthemix website just the way it is so aiming to progressively make the mobile inthemix site as close to the real deal in terms of functionality would be uber impressive!

Cheers!
Zol

Done a great job, all the above lil touch ups will help to make it an easy to use excellent website.
Good work!!!

On my android phone i cannot click the bottom drop menu, because the android 'resize' and 'center' buttons pop up if i touch there.

Also when i try to go to the non mobile site i get a nasty error message (server error), so a redirect would work well

Cheers

Looking good so far...clean + simple. My suggestions:

- Menu up the top for quick access, similar to what you have on the normal website, instead of the drop down type menu (quicker access)
- Ads for revenue? Bah...who likes ads...
- When you bookmark the page you should have an icon for it, rather than a screenshot of the webpage
- Pinch and drag gesturing
- Expandable blue menu items so that they all dont load - tap on i.e. 'events' to expand it. Saves space and loading = increase in load time

You're welcome.

The layout now is very simple and easy to use and really good for showing the fresh news for the day... although much improvement can be made...
i would suggest tabs on the left hand side of the screen and as you click each tab it switches between headlines, local news, international news etc (imagine a dashboard of a high tech comms tablet)... and have the login / status in the top right... reason for all this, as it is a mobile site, the less scrolling the better, and just has a more personalised feel to the page.
Also a more prominent inthemix logo... seems a bit small/ insignificant
another thing would be to include a whats on tab for whichever city is selected, as people would use their mobile and go on inthemix to see what is on while they are out for any given night

Site is nice and simple evrything need to know on homepage, pretty impressed. now i dont have to race home after work to pc! i have no suggestions just stoked i can keep up to date with most recent articles.

Site is great..i like how it's ad free and fast loading.

Can u make sure that there is a way to jump out of the sub categories into categories or from the threads to the subcategories??

Also would u ever have an itm app??

Thanks for all your feedback dudes and dudettes. Since the mobile site is djdrey's baby I've decided to hand over judging of prize winners to him. He'll announce the four lucky recipients soon Peace out!

Thanks Santa! and thanks so much to everyone who tried out the 'm' site and gave such great feedback. Choosing the best was difficult, but I've settled on the posts by:

joe8307 - http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/sho...4&postcount=37 ** BEST
davidhes - http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/sho...6&postcount=28
dr_mat - http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/sho...6&postcount=33
plan-b - http://www.inthemix.com.au/forum/sho...22&postcount=9

joe8307 in particular went all out with screenshots and markups that I'd be proud to receive from any testing team? joe > want to join our volunteer QA team?

Thanks again everyone. You may have noticed we sent a small update to the mobile site live yday around 5pm, the main changes including:

• new homepage with separated article sections and ability to drill into more per section by clicking on the heading
• article pages now have a 'next article' link. So now, if you're reading news, you can very simply read the next news item, and the next and so on..
• comments are now shown in articles (ability to post replies coming soon)
• some visual tweaks and a few bug fixes

congratulations you lucky devils

Thanks very much djdrey! Love the page and looking forward to viewing it using my new wifi modem ;-) Keep up the great work and I will keep trying to find improvements for it.

G'day djdrey,

Glad you found my feedback useful =) Also nice to win something as well!!

Hit me up on my email if you wan't chat about me doing any further testing.

Peace
Joe

In addition to my earlier post, here's some more pointless code that doesn't really help with anything:

<body onload="setTimeout(function() { window.scrollTo(0, 1) }, 100);"></body>

Hey all. Mobile site has been updated!

The 'forum jump' drop down isn't working no more

Terrible. So drab and you can't see when there are new posts in a thread.

I take that back, I meant there is no way to return to the forum you came from down the bottom of the page.

Also can't quote peoples comments.

Also STILL can't edit posts (which is what I would do with the one above)

Photos now stretch wider than the width of the screen.

Every thread in every forum is bold, so I can't tell which ones have new posts.

Just saw the 'view all threads in this forum' button.

Prefer the smaller text in the quick reply box

Um new forum layout is pants. You're meant add functionality when you update it not take it away

Can't quote or edit (still) and can't see if there's been a new post. FAIL

ok - so what's new..

• The forum has a new, more streamlined look - no more red that a few people complained about.
• In the forum, we've improved navigation between pages and integrated the navigation into the rest of the m.inthemix.com.au site
• What's on!! The http://m.inthemix.com.au site now includes the full what's on guide
• Visiting the forum on a mobile device automatically forwards you to the m.inthemix.com.au domain. Switching back now works properly too. (we'll do this soon on the rest of the site)

btw> regarding the forum thread display.. Currently we're just showing the thread title. I'll get the bold facing fixed for read/unread.. but outside of that, do you want more controls on a per thread basis on that page? eg.

* jump to first unread
* date/time last post
* number replies

??? It'd clutter the UI a little, but would give you more info.. Opinions?

The first two of those would be good. Also quote post is gone.

First two.

Maybe make the text in the reply box a little bigger too. And the first line a little further down.

looks alot worse than the old browser and on the forums you can't differentiate between old threads and threads that have a new post...
Im using a Nokia N97

It looks very slick, my only suggestion is a 'back to top' button like there was before. If ur reading a super long thread u have to scroll all the way back to the top.
Oh and Forum jump doesn't work, there used to be a go button then it would load. Now it does nothing.