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Usability on the mobile Web: best practices and guidelines for designers and developers

Editor — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 08:24:33 +0000

In this era of technology, we are continuously interacting with things so it is vital that these interactions form positive experiences for us. This is true not only for objects or products we can physically touch, but equally so for intangibles such as websites.

The most common mistakes in smartphone sites according to Google

Veruska Anconitano — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 08:46:46 +0000

Google are paying ever more attention to the mobile market and so, developers pay attention when the Big G is making recommendations. Google recently published a document on the main mistakes people make when working on mobile websites for smartphones. If you look through the list you can definitely recognize a cornerstone of Google's approach: focus on the end user. Or put another way, "adopt the approach you want but be aware of your audience".

Global reach and dynamic page weight – is there a correlation?

ronan — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 17:52:09 +0000

Many reports on web page sizes issued in recent years point to the same conclusion: the web has a weight problem. The web seems to be gaining weight each year despite the fact that study after study has shown a strongly negative reaction from users to heavy web pages and resulting loading times.

Why Responsive Web Design is not always the best option for a mobile SEO strategy

Veruska Anconitano — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 14:27:57 +0000

There are a lot of misconceptions about what Google is saying about mobile SEO. First and foremost, Google doesn't mandate the use of Responsive Web Design (RWD) as best practice for SEO. Google expressly says "Google does not favor any particular URL format as long as they are all accessible to both Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile” the bots Google uses to crawl desktop and Smartphone specific content. And it’s worth noting here that Google is crawling desktop and mobile content separately.

Performance is money, part 1: the end-user's wallet

ronan — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:43:44 +0000

Most web developers are familiar with the maxim that light is good: the idea that page performance matters to the end user experience is a truism at this point, backed up by a tremendous amount of real-world evidence, summarised quite nicely at websiteoptimization.com.

Introducing Prism, a tool for testing device adaptation

ronan — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 16:20:43 +0000

Due to the multifarious nature of the mobile web, developers tend to spend a lot of time testing their work. If your site is designed to adapt to multiple different devices this effort is multiplied because you need to ensure that your detection is working correctly across multiple devices and that your response is appropriate in each case.

Anatomy of a mobile web experience: facebook.com

ronan — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 17:08:25 +0000

This is the second article in a series about how the major internet brands deliver their mobile web experience. The previous article is available here: Anatomy of a mobile web experience: google.com

Future of the Mobile Web Whitepaper

mclancy — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:46:11 +0000

We're very happy to publish this paper arising from the The Future of the Mobile Web event held at the Dublin Convention Centre in January 2012. We covered a lot of ground and the paper is a serious attempt to capture all the topics covered from HTML5 to responsive design to device detection and many others. We found it to be a very worthwhile process to listen, validate our ideas and learn from others in the process of writing it. We hope it is useful to a wider readership also.

Future of the Mobile Web

mclancy — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:13:12 +0000

Last week we hosted an event loftily entitled "The Future of the Mobile Web" at the Dublin Convention Centre.

Server-side device detection used by 82% of Alexa top 100 sites

ronan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 14:53:12 +0000

About 82% of the Alexa 100 top sites use some form of server-side device detection to serve content on their main website entry point. As you descend from the top 10 to the top 25 and top 100 sites the percentage of sites using server-side detection falls from 100% to 96% to 82%. This is an interesting fact given the all of the recent discussion in the blogosphere of responsive design using client-side techniques such as media queries.