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NEWSLETTERS | APRIL, 2010 Your Website, In Your Pocket By Christopher Butler Millions* of people worldwide are accessing the web using mobile devices. Until relatively recently, the user experience was barely worthwhile, but devices like the iPhone, Android phones, and even the Google Nexus One have changed all that. Their larger touchscreen interfaces allow users to experience much more—and consequently expect much more, too—from the web. Mobile device adoption rates may be bewildering, but they leave no doubt as to the reality that soon, most users will access the web using them rather than a desktop or laptop machine. If you haven't given any thought to how your website appears and functions on a mobile device, now is the time to do so. Fortunately, the web platform used by the devices listed above has been built to handle the existing web quite well, making it likely that your site will at least be functional on an albeit much reduced scale. So rather than facing a complete rebuild of your site in order to stay current, conceiving of a smaller, functionally-limited version of your site for mobile devices is your wisest first move. This month, I'd like to give our readers a preview of our mobile development program, and in doing so, outline our process for optimizing an existing website for mobile use. *As of the latest 2010 sales reports, Apple has sold 51.15 million iPhones since they launched the product in 2007; 8.45 million Android phones have sold since their release in October, 2008; 135,000 Nexus One phones have sold since its release in January 2010; and over 1,000,000 iPads sold since March.  
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This is a very impressive package. I do think it's smart to scale down what is considered for iphone and the like, though it does seem to me that we are actually now talking about a second website in the end, not just an adaptation, correct? For instance, numerous UI considerations come into play with a mobile site that you wouldn't consider in the same manner for a standard one. But, preloading the page and then letting the user control the expansion of portions of it is a superb idea. Even on 3G the time to load additional pages is quite precious! I would not want to wait an additional 15 seconds to view the comments on a blog post.
Rod: The way I'd differentiate between a project that adapts an existing website and one that creates a separate site for mobile devices is that an adaptation is limited to alternate mobile-optimized templates that are called from the database when a user accesses the site with a mobile device. A separate mobile site would have a separate database, with mobile-specific content that would be managed separately from the main site's content. This differentiation is, I think, a central selling point of our approach. While some may desire to manage two sets of content and have a more granular level of control over it on a context-specific basis, most of the interest we've received about mobile optimization tends to be in the area of ensuring that existing website content is accessible, legible, and functional for users accessing the site with their mobile devices.
On that note, I'm trying to stick to referring to these devices generically (though it's tempting to just say iPhone) since our approach is to develop for the WebKit platform, which, as I mentioned in the article, is used by a diversity of devices. Though the iPhone is most popular in our circle, the Android platform is rapidly growing and the promise is that the next generation of BlackBerry devices will be built to WebKit specifications as well. I'd like our clients and prospective clients to be confident that what we build for them will have the widest possible scope, not just be limited to one, albeit popular, device.
Preloading and truncating the page was something that Dave Mello, the developer who built our site and recently adapted it for mobile, came up with after realizing that the length of our articles tended to require a bit too much vertical scrolling in order to get an overview of what was on the page. By setting it up this way, you only have to wait once for page content to load (which, by the way, is quite fast compared to other sites I've accessed on a mobile device) and can quickly see that there are additional areas of content, like comments and related links.
Thanks for reading, and for your comments!
Blackberry will have a WebKit browser. There's a demo of it on their blog here: http://devblog.blackberry.com/2010/02/blackberry-webkit-browser-preview-at-mobile-world-congress/
As usual, you all have done a great job putting this together. Very nice!
Chuck: Thanks for that link. It looks like this tech is about a year old at this point? I noticed that several commenters asked for an idea of when this would be released but there was no reply from the author. Any idea?
Linda: Thank you very much!
How are you dealing with content like videos or flash that may not work on mobile devices?
Hey Mike! We generally advise our clients to avoid Flash, but many of our clients have video on their sites that use a Flash-based player. So, moving forward, this will be a compatibility issue for them. For the past few years, the .flv video format was the best option for web video--it is fast, high quality, and light in terms of file size. But it isn't going to be suitable for mobile devices. The html 5 standard now will allow for a very light player that deals directly with .mov files, so we're trying to give our client base a "heads up" to move to that format. Meanwhile, embedding YouTube videos should still be a good solution for those not using video to sell products or services. On the iPad, embedded YouTube videos will be recognized and played in context, since the browser communicates with the YouTube application. I understand that this is not the case now with the iPhone, but I imagine it will be soon.