Manoj Kumar

Mobile Device and Web

With mobile internet usage increasing, how important is to for your web presence to be mobile friendly and is also tracked ?

A 2008 Nielsen Media Research highlights that there is an average lift of 13% in mobile web audience and Jakob Nielson’s alertbox says Mobile Web 2009 = Desktop Web 1998, certainly mobile web has a significant role to play. But the question is there are hundreds of devices and models, so where do we start ? Here tracking your mobile web presence is important.

While with the help of google analytics tool you can easily track screen size, bowser and the OS, but if you want to provide a remarkable experience to your audience you should also know about the models being used . Then figure out the capability of that device so you can provide a better experience.

Recently I came across a site called percentmobile.com which provides us a comprehensive analysis on mobile devices, below is a screenshot of there sample report.

Now we know enough about our site to start work :

A site developer can create a mobile friendly site without much changes in existing code, but certainly there are some important things that they should keep in mind while developing a site for mobile. They are

1. Highest used device for his site
2. Screen size
3. CPU speed
4. Network capabilities etc.

HTML 4 Specifications allows you to use specific style sheet for your target device. To know more about what works on which device, mobile test suites are listed

1. Media descriptors
2. Mobile Test Harness