It’s A Small (Mobile) World After All
Hands up which developers have only ever done their web design on small screens. I thought so .. no one. If you’re skilled and experienced in website design, then you’ve spent most of your designing career creating web pages that displayed well on large screens. Suddenly you’re aware that the Mobile Web seems to be growing at an astonishing rate. How do you ensure that your large screen web pages will display well on small screens? There are lots of challenges there but lots of opportunities..
The Financial Express points out the potential in a piece, “Is the Internet?s future shifting to mobile phones?” It suggests that the very nature of content and services will evolve. Here is what it says:
The primary trend is the massive broad-based adoption of mobile phones worldwide. The mobile user base is much larger and growing faster than the PC user base. Globally, the installed base of mobile phones (roughly 2.7 billion in 2006) is about three times that of personal computers (roughly 850 million in 2006). The growth rate is higher too? nearly a billion mobile phones were sold in 2006, compared to about 250 million PCs in the same period.
There are a number of resources to help you design for these Mobile applications. The dot Mobi people are suggesting that building a mobile site has never been easier. A Wall Street Journal article lists quite a number of new tools that can help create cellphone-friendly web sites. dotMobi also provides a Mobile Web Developer Guide (PDF). Really there’s no excuse for not giving your mobile website visitors a highly satisfactory user experience.
Related: Design For Mobile Device Diversity
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BPWrap
December 28th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
My problem with mobile browsing is not the screen or even how things are displayed, but the #1 mobile browsing issue I have is compatibility. Sure you can read most of the content online, but it can be a drag after spending some time on amazon researching some books only to receive errors in the checkout.
February 27th, 2009 at 10:00 am
I know webmasters and designer who have started checking their sites even on third generation consoles. I think we can’t survive without mobile optimization. Sooner or later, it is going to be happen and we should go with the revolution.