Mobile Web Optimization

Mobile web use has exponentially increased on account of the drastic up rise in the presence of smart-phones and the ease of their mobile web usability. The mobile web has seen a growth of 110 percent in the U.S. last year and 148 percent worldwide as measured by growth in pageviews (U.S. Mobile Web Usage Grew 110 Percent Last Year; Apple Dominates, Android No. 2). This numbers are very likely to see another big hike in the oncoming years as we see a decrease in the cost of feature rich smartphones and attractive data plans. Google's take in the mobile web market with its launch of Nexus One clearly shows the importance of the smartphones and the mobile web industry. Needless to say, there are 3 times as much as Mobile phones as compared to desktops and virtually all phones on the market today are web-enabled. This depicts the tremendous potential in the mobile web industry. This increases the importance for any company to not neglect the mobile web audience and have an optimized mobile web page. Here I'll give some informative links and tips to improve your mobile web presence.

Mobile Web Browsers

There are a number of most widely used mobile web browsers available in the market. The best ones might probably be already built into the mobile phone (Safari in iPhone). Some Java based Browsers (Opera) are available to be downloaded and installed on the phone. For more detailed information on mobile web browsers, visit A List of Mobile Web Browsers.

General Optimization Requirements for Mobile Web

• It should load fast.
• It should be easily navigable
• It should not contain irritating popups
• The links should be small and precise
• Prefer to have only vertical scrolling and not both
• It should be optimized for most screen sizes. For more information on screen size, visit Mobile screen size trends

Great news for Drupal users, there is a direct module available which helps in making web pages specifically for mobile - Mobile by Mobify

Mobile Web Page Optimization

As opposed to desktop based web pages, mobile web pages should be small, light, easily navigable and easily loadable. The mobile web pages should be designed in such a way there are no loading problems on different mobile web platforms. W3C has released recommendations for the mobile web - Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0. Complying to these recommendations will ensure clean, user-friendly, highly optimized mobile web site. Below are some neat tips to optimize your mobile web pages for your cellular audience:

• Keep minimal styling. Use of complicated styling on your mobile web page may distort some of the panels in different browsers
• Optimize all your images specifically for the mobile web browsers. Larger pictures will be high on size and will account for increase in loading time. Also, make sure your image complies with the Mobile screen size trends
• The file sizes should be minimal to ensure fast loading
• Put links of both desktop version and mobile version of your mobile web page on both desktop and mobile version
• Rely mostly on texts and minimize resorting to images, flash etc

More Resources on Mobile Web Optimization:

• The current best source for mobile user statistics is http://www.mmetrics.com/
• Another interesting article on Mobile Web Optimization - obile Web Design: Methods to the Madness