- Best Practices - Posted by Veruska Anconitano on 17 Apr 2013
The most common mistakes in smartphone sites according to Google- 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".
- Best Practices - Posted by ronan on 05 Apr 2013
Global reach and dynamic page weight – is there a correlation?- 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.
- Best Practices - Posted by Veruska Anconitano on 21 Mar 2013
- Why Responsive Web Design is not always the best option for a mobile SEO strategy
- 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.
- Publishing - Posted by ronan on 01 Nov 2012
- Introducing Prism, a tool for testing device adaptation
- 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.
- Design Patterns - Posted by ronan on 28 Mar 2012
Anatomy of a mobile web experience: google.com- In a recent blog post that I did here on mobiForge (Server-side device detection used by 82% of Alexa top 100 sites) some people expressed surprise that a 47 byte difference in the HTML payload delivered by Google to different devices constituted a significant level of server-side adaptation. On checking my results, it turned out that this minor 47 byte file size difference actually masks an entirely different HTML document served to
- Mobile Design - Posted by mclancy on 23 Feb 2012
Future of the Mobile Web Whitepaper- 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.
- - Posted by ronan on 11 Jan 2012
- Server-side device detection used by 82% of Alexa top 100 sites
- 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.
- Mobile Design - Posted by mclancy on 06 Jan 2012
- Future of the Mobile Web: Request for submissions
- Dear mobiForge community, We have invited a number of colleagues and opinion formers from across several different verticals to a forum event in Dublin on January 26th next to discuss some of the most pressing issues, trends, opportunities and challenges in today’s mobile web environment. People from companies like Adobe, Cloud Four, Nokia, Yiibu and others will be coming along. The idea is to build towards a consensus on current technology, facts, fictions and opportunities of the mobile web in an environment that is increasingly noisy and hype filled.
- Best Practices - Posted by ronan on 01 Nov 2011
Mobile web content adaptation techniques- Introduction This article will help you pick from amongst the many techniques for building a mobile website. It doesn't describe how to do it, rather it instead tries to help you to pick the right approach. Before we begin it's worth clarifying exactly what the goal of the exercise is. Generally speaking, people who are looking to build a mobile site fall into two categories. They're either:
- Device Database - Posted by ronan on 15 Sep 2011
- The best of breakingdevelopment conference
- As many of you know, the breakingdevelopment conference took place in Nashville, Tennessee over the last few days. It appears to have been a really seminal conference with 13 leading mobile web developers speaking. Others have already put together summaries of the conference but I thought I'd link to what I thought were the most interest presentations.
