Create a Sony PSP web site in 5 easy steps
Sony’s PlayStation Portable is a competent portable console with many functions. Not only can you play advanced games with it, you can also play music, watch movies and surf the web with its own web browser. The PSP have built in wireless network connectivity so it is possible to browse the web wherever there is a hotspot.
The browser for the PSP is very capable, a surprising amount of websites work very good with the PSP browser and browsing forums and normal day to day sites generally works good. Many sites with heavy data will show an error on the PSP since memory is limited and the PSP can not swap out to the memory stick. Also in today’s world dominated by Internet Explorer, some sites will render wrong in the PSP browser. But that is to be expected since Internet Explorer is the defacto browser of today.
A tedious task with the PSP is to type in web addresses because letters have to be typed in with the keypad on a virtual keyboard. The solution to this problem is to make a startup page which contains all your favorite links in order to reduce the amount of links to be typed in.
About the PSP screen, from a viewpoint of a web designer
The PSP is well known for its amazing widescreen display. The display has a resolution of 480×272 which is a lot smaller than standard VGA resolutions but larger than typical cell phone displays. A dedicated site for a PSP should not be wider than 480 pixels but can be taller than 272 pixels.
Just for facts, 800×600 or 779×570 used to be the resolution your site should have around the millennium. Today most computers ship with displays of higher quality so 480×272 is tiny in comparison with typical computer screens.
A web designer’s view on the page styles of PSP sites
A site for the PSP can be made in two ways, either it is made up of different screens with the resolution 480×272 (no scrolling) or it is made up of a taller page that scrolls vertically. We prefer to make a site for PSP with different screens, or cards as we like to call them (web designers who have done WAP sites will remember calling pages “cards”). Every page or card sans the start page should have a home link for the start page, a forward link for the next card and a backwards link for the previous card.
Make a startup page for your PSP in 5 easy steps:
1. Start your favorite WYSIWYG design package or notepad and create a table that is 480 pixels wide and 272 pixels tall.
2. Place your content inside the table you just created and be sure that the width of the table does not increase.
3. Add the following code in the header of your HTML file. You need to set the margin and padding to zero otherwise the table will not be perfectly centered in your PSP browser.
<style>
body {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
</style>
4. Upload the HTML file to your web server of choice. Many ISP’s give you some free space where you can put up your personal homepage. Your PSP page will work perfectly from there.
5. Configure your PSP browser to open your page as the startup page. Now you have easy access to your favorite websites.
Improvements
You can add a clock with JavaScript to your startup page. You can make a very advanced looking page, you do not need to make a basic looking site just because it is designed for the PSP so go crazy with some nice background effects made in Photoshop. Test size is very important considering the screen for the PSP is smaller than normal, try to experiment with different size fonts to find the one that works best for your site.