Websites for the Mobile Web

With the rise of the iPhone, Google Android, Palm, Blackberry and several other touch screen phones out there that are not only web enabled, but offer a browsing experience similar to the one we are familiar with on desktop computers, the need for mobile friendly websites is becoming greater. I've had several web enabled phones, but the most recent one I purchased has given me a much more fluid and intuitive web experience. It's shown me, though, that most websites aren't coded with mobile phones in mind.

The Evolution of the Mobile Web

Coding websites for mobile phones has changed over the years. In the past, WML was used to design pages, and they rarely had a very stylish look to them. It was usually text that would wrap so that you could read it, but it offered very little in the ability to make the site visually interesting. This was necessary since data speeds offered by mobile providers were not very fast. Even with just text and maybe a few images, load times were sluggish.

Then the advent of 2G and then 3G speeds came into play. Data can now move almost as fast over the mobile networks as it does in a home wireless network. Add to that mobile screen sizes that are in the 4 inch range instead of the 1 and a half inch range. Now actually looking at a regular website has become possible. WML has suddenly gone out the door, and in comes HTML and style sheets like with regular websites.

While the mobile web has been around for just over a decade, all of these recent changes have happened within the past several years. I think it's safe to say that we can blame the iPhone and Apple for that. While the WAP 2.0 standards have been around since 2002, the mobile web didn't take off until 2007, when the first iPhone was released. Now cell phone data plans are starting to be more and more common. There is speculation that in another decade, the internet will be mostly experienced by mobile phones. With that in mind, it might be a good idea to consider improving your website's mobile phone presence.

Competing Modes of Thought

There are several modes of thought on how to approach a mobile website. One is to use a separate style sheet by specifying a media attribute when you link the stylesheet to the page. You can find a great wealth of information on how to do that at the World Wide Web Consortium's website. This helps you separate the styles that will appear on the browser for a desktop and the browser on the mobile phone so you can change the appearance to fit the medium on which the site is viewed. This works great for some sites, but others it may not be the best choice.

An example of a site that wouldn't work with the aforementioned technique might be something like CNN.com. There's just so much information coming in and being displayed that even with a separate style sheet, the site just wouldn't display or perform well on a mobile phone.

The solution to that problem is to create an alternate website. In the case of CNN, they created cnnmobile.com, which pares down the data and displays much less information than the main cnn.com homepage. From the mobile site, you can quickly access news headlines and get to the articles. Load times are significantly faster, and the mobile web experience is a much smoother one.

Some Difficulties to Keep in Mind

Much like with a desktop computer, there are many mobile web browsers out there. Some are based on the webkit platform like Google Chrome and Apple Safari. Others are based on other technologies, each of which will have it's own quirks and issues to work through. So testing becomes a very important part of the development process. Test your mobile site as much as possible on as many mobile platforms as you can to ensure that everyone can enjoy your website on their phone. Otherwise, it's possible that with the coming future of the mobile web, the lack of a good mobile web presence could cause you to lose customers. That worry is perhaps a few years off, but it's always good to think ahead.

Conclusions

With my new phone, I've had some excellent mobile browsing experiences, and some that are really frustrating. I know that I've not typically considered mobile platforms when I've developed websites in the past, and this phone has opened my eyes to the need to consider adding mobile platform support to my websites. I will be devoting some time in the near future to adapting my websites to fit on mobile platforms and making sure that any site I work on in the future has a functional and usable mobile presence.