media=”handheld”
The buzz around town for the last year or so has been all about mobile web and for the first time, we’re really starting to see some interesting things in this area of web development. In December of 2006, Read/WriteWeb published their predictions for Web Technology growth in 2007.
Among those predictions, they listed that 27% of people surveyed thought that Online Video and Internet TV would take the lead in growth, while 22% thought Web-based Apps would continue to lead and 15%, Mobile Web. With Companies such as Google, Yelp and YouTube all optimized for Mobile use, the number of people accessing the internet via their trusty hand phone is rising rapidly.
I’ll take mine to go
I wanted to take a look back at these predictions because over the last 6 months I’ve found myself more and more inundated with web application work, that specifically takes advantage of mobile technology. Not necessarily mobile website, but applications that are bridging the gap. In fact, the top 3 areas from the Read/WriteWeb predictions pretty much fill my plate these days.
Despite past claims that Asia is years ahead of the U.S. and U.K. in mobile web use, a recent survey taken in March, by Online Publishers, claims that mobile web use in the U.S. is actually higher now.
The fact that more people are accessing the web from mobile devices, means designing for mobile web is increasingly important. The conundrum for us designers is, “how do we do that?”
I can certainly relate. Design for mobile web? A joke right? The support for CSS among mobile web browsers is abysmal at best, but there are things you can do and things you want to consider, when designing for mobile devices. If you are tasked with designing for mobile devices, the first thing you can do is jog over to Patrick Grifith’s mobile media test page and see what css media types your mobile device supports. This, of course, wont give you an accurate overview of mobile devices at large, but you can see what options are available. The key to designing for mobile devices is simplicity. Regardless of the advances in technology to come, when your workable real estate is smaller than a business card. The second thing you should do is read Cameron Moll’s series on mobile web design. He provides an excellent background and very useful tips.
However, if you need something quick and dirty, to just make your website more accessible from mobile devices, Google has a bare-bones tool that will make your website, a mobile website in a click (and it’s not that bad, at that). If you want to see it in action for this site, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.repeatpenguin.com/ on your mobile device.
Just a stat from Foobr.co.uk I read recently about how many people are buying mobil-ready phones: A total of 252 million mobile phones were shipped in Q1 2007 and with most new phones offering some form of internet access everyone needs to think how usuable their site is when using a mobile phone (or other handheld).
Another side note: Mozilla’s experimenting with a service that lets users store online content on a remote server and access that information on cell phones. This is going to allow more people to access files faster and hence, become heavier mobile media users.
People better start writing their mobile stylesheets now dammit!
真是太喜欢了！
very good!
[…] I touched upon some of the set backs for mobile web design in my post media=”handheld”, and again with iThumb, but what I didn’t talk about was what all this means for mobile web design in the years to come. […]