Yasin Ansari

Is mobile web browsing part of your website consideration?

Category // Web Design

I recently got myself a phone contract with a blackberry bold and I have to say my life is never going to be the same as I find myself using my berry more and more for my everyday online chores. The other day I went about looking at some of our websites on mobile and it brought up a question for me.

As if having a variety of screen resolutions and multiple browsers wasn’t enough spice to design, has the time come when we need to start taking mobile browsing experiences into serious consideration?

Below is a breakdown of what market share web browsing phones have:

1. iPhone 64.81%
2. Android 8.42%
3. Java ME 8.09%
4. Symbian 7.39%
5. Windows Mobile 5.52%
6. Blackberry 3.47%
7. Palm 1.80%
8. BREW 0.50%

Without question iPhone would be the leader of the pack with Safari on iPhone being the most popular web browser. I have had the opportunity to attend a few mobile marketing presentations lately and one reality is that in the African continent more people have mobiles then computers. And now with mobile technology only vastly improving web browsing capability, a large segment of users who once used computers are now using mobiles more for personal and general browsing. This isn’t taking into account the power mobile apps bring to your handy little device. The good news is that most mobile browsers will renders your website relatively well as long as you were smart enough not to have a flash based site. I have found that using iframes and some javascripts doesn’t really work. Surely if we start using a strategy of eliminating script use on our websites because the same site won’t work on a mobile could be very limiting but maybe this is the call to start building mobile sites along with main websites for companies.

With CMS solutions like wordpress, joomla, drupal and a few more, there are plug-ins available that will transform your website into a much simpler format when viewed from a mobile. But not all sites are built using CMS, in our case we build in xhtml and css which not only delivers a powerful customised branded web experience from your computer but an equally functional.

The sterkinekor website (although powered by flash) is one of the sites that I’ve always enjoyed. The web experience works for a cinema brand. It’s really easy to use, delivers content well and best part they have a mobi site that doesn’t use flash but delivers the same content.

The good news is that mobile browsers render most html and css sites relatively well as long as you keeping to what’s considered best practise. Frames, flash sites, full image sites will only continue to access a specific market on a time limit of 8 to 5 market that is getting quite intelligent about sites that are built to deliver content.

So whether its building a mobi site along side with your main website or simply a section that has your site reworked for mobile (ideally dynamically displaying content across both platforms) and accessible via an easy to find link in your layout, its quickly becoming imperative that the facility is made available.

References :

• http://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/articles/mobile-web-browser-usage-statistics.php
• http://www.techstartnews.com/229/state-of-the-mobile-web-in-south-africa