About BareSite

Improvements at BareSite

baresite — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 18:26:03 +0000

We’ve been working hard to increase usability and speed of BareSite. Last week, we added “go” buttons for all browse and search fields on BareSite. Some phones do not have “enter’ buttons, and those phones could not use baresite properly. With the “go” buttons added, now all these mobiles work with BareSite, increasing support to up to 97% of mobiles out there.

Furthermore we have been working on speed. New scripting has increased speed by over 60%, making mobile browsing even faster. We continue to work on new features and your feedback is always welcome.

Added “Go” buttons to browse fields

baresite — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 20:08:02 +0000

Yesterday we added “go” buttons for both browse and search fields on BareSite. Some phones did not allow users to use an “enter” key to submit browse results, and required a submit button. By adding the buttons, we solved this problem. Most phones will still let users use their phone-enter key to submit an url or a search word to BareSite, but in case that doesn’t work, simply use the “Go” button.

One hundred thousand views

baresite — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 16:49:29 +0000

The launch of BareSite has generated a lot of media attention. After Mobilecrunch wrote about us, a lot of other blogs picked up on the story. Today we got a review on Killerstartups.com – and it wasn’t even our own submission!

All the attention together resulted in over 100.000 views on the first few days of our release, and a lot of feedback. Currently we are working on a number of improvements of the site. Keep an eye on this blog to follow us, and keep using BareSite of course.

Why the name “BareSite”?

baresite — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 16:40:32 +0000

This is a question we’ve gotten about 30 times today after our launch. Simply said: BareSite.com strips websites to their “bare essentials”, needed for mobile browsing. That’s what the name originated from. We strip style tags and all scripts, leaving just a bare site. On the web it may look fairly simple and ugly, but once you use BareSite on a mobile phone, you’ll see it looks fairly good, considering we crunch sites up to 90%.

Launching BareSite beta

baresite — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 09:39:35 +0000

After a few weeks of testing, we are launching BareSite.com today. Although we expect BareSite to slowly grow in traffic the coming time, we are sending out a release to a few websites. Read below.

BareSite.com makes every website mobile

Browsing websites with a mobile phone such as a BlackBerry is often a unsatisfying experience. Many websites are still mobile unfriendly. New startup BareSite.com wants to change that. They have developed a webbased browser that makes mobile browsing easier and cheaper. Simply put BareSite.com strips websites from all “unneeded content” creating an extremely light mobile version that shows well on mobile devices. On average, sites are crunched over 90 percent.

Next step in mobile browsing
The developers find their solution has a number of important advantages over currently available mobile browsers, such as Google’s mobile browser which only offers a simple browsing interface. BareSite.com has integrated mobile search for weather, traffic, news, and even jobs. Its interface is highly customizable. Users have full control over appearance and browsing settings. With handy one-click lists, such as one’s most visited, favorites and last visited pages, it intends to make mobile browsing fast and easy. Users can enter urls, feeds, or choose from a directory which holds the 100 most popular websites. Registration is not needed, and no ads are shown.

Webbased approach instead of browserbased
BareSite.com has chosen a webbased approach for its solution. People surf to BareSite.com with their mobile, and enter the url of the page or feed they want to visit. BareSite then converts the website or feed to a mobile friendly version. While browserbased solutions, such as Opera Mini, require users to download and install software, BareSite does not require any downloads.

Autodetecting feeds

baresite — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 13:51:16 +0000

We have decided to turn automatic detection of feeds on, so that whenever someone enters an url of a site, which then tells us that it has a feed, the contents of the feed is shown.

For example: someone enters cnn.com. Other sites that crunch content then display the (heavy) contents of cnn.com, in a crunched version. BareSite discovers that cnn.com has a feed, and automatically displays the feed contents. Saves time and money.

Set up your own preferences

baresite — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 11:01:37 +0000

We’ve enhanced our preferences function: now you can set up your BareSite starting page and result pages the way you like. For example: you can decided if how many favorites are displayed on each page, or how many “last visited” pages are shown. Another issue we got back from our beta testers is the abstinance of a searchform at the top of result pages. We’ve now added the option to include search and browser forms on the top of each page.

Favorites, last visited, most visited

baresite — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:59:55 +0000

People who use their mobile for browsing the web, on average only visit 30 pages every month. One of the most heard issues with mobile browsing is the “pain” of typing in urls. Therefore we’ve aded a favorite function to BareSite. And: lists with most visited and last visited urls, which are automatically updated. One click gets you to any site in the lists.

Automatic feed recognition

baresite — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 10:57:48 +0000

We’ve just added automatic feed recognition to BareSite. When you type in a feed url, it is automatically recognized as a feed and displayed as such. The best way to view mobile sites is through feeds. The urls in the feed are changed into BareSite links, so that once you click on them, you can view the articles directly with BareSite.

How many mobile devices exist?

baresite — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:57:46 +0000

When creating a tool that supports most mobile devices, one comes to the question which devices do exist out there. And: how they let users browse the web. Although the goal of BareSite is to work perfectly on every device, we have found it almost impossible to be compatible with all mobile devices. Our software is first tested on all Blackberry’s. From there, we take it to most other devices. Each device seems to have its own “special” way of showing web content. Even special mobile browsers show a considerable difference in presenting content. For now, we have chosen to test BareSite on devices that together make up 95% of the market. From there we’ll take user feedback and increase this percentage.