Designing a Mobile Web Site
Design is an important element of any competitive software in the world, where everyone can offer the same service, but the good design is the differentiator. Users usually want to look at beautifully designed pages and their confidence in the software product is higher if it is well designed and reliable. How many clients would buy an iPhone just for its features? There are other phones that provide similar or better features, but users would like to have an iPhone because of its excellent design. Everyone now knows that a mobile Web user has different goals while accessing Web content. Different mobile devices have different capabilities and the designers must take care of that while designing their mobile website.
There are many trends in Web design that are classified as Web 2.0 sites such as using CSS in design, good metaphors, good colors that reflect the business while enriching the design. The successful Web designer is the designer who can employee all the above tools to reflect the current business language and to make it easy for users to access information when needed by few clicks. Below are some tips for designing a mobile website that should be taken in consideration when going for mobile Web.
- Great mobile sites start with function over form
Mobile users tend to look for mobile web sites that address a need (entertainment, productivity, and communication are the most popular). Therefore, it is imperative that design serves to facilitate the underlying functional requirements of the site.
- Performance is most desirable
Mobile users have a bewildering number of choices for interactive engagement. Performance is the easiest and best way to stand out. Users have no tolerance for slow performance.
- Simplicity
Mobile web sites must be driven from a simple idea or concept and then execute flawlessly against that concept. Mobile web sites that quickly communicate simple and compelling value to consumers have a much higher success rate than those sites that do not.
- Don’t build an app when a site can do
Mobile apps add a vast amount of management complexity, so it doesn’t make sense to use mobile apps for what a site can do. Mobile web sites avoid all of the development overhead for mobile apps while allowing for a much faster path to execution.
- Engage the design team early and often
Despite the technical challenges of mobile execution, sites still begin and end with designers.
- Balance design elements to drive performance
Mobile devices are very under powered compared to traditional computers, so the performance impact of design elements is even more exacerbated on mobile devices.
- Define brands in the user interface
The user interface should reflect the brand’s identity. Brand awareness in the design process increases user recognition, leverages existing user loyalty, and results in enhanced user satisfaction.
- Identify and address core users
Mobile is inherently more selective than the general public Web. This is why it is vital that mobile sites be specifically developed to address distinct user profiles and use cases.
- Optimize design for perceived performance
The sad truth is that no matter how well a web site is implemented, the mobile ecosystem remains unreliable. Carriers, locations, and devices can all have a pronounced effect on mobile Web performance. Therefore, it is critical to identify those areas of potential performance degradation such as data fetching & calculations and then develop design strategies to minimize the user performance impact of a slowdown.
- Balance design priorities with performance requirements
Mobile web sites have to perform well, look great, and deliver significant user value on underpowered computers that use tiny screens with limited bandwidth. The success or failure of mobile websites is most often attributed to how well these two disciplines are balanced.
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Mobile Limitation and Mobile Web Sites Challenges
The widespread deployment of Web enabled mobile devices made them a target of choice for content creators. Understanding their strengths and their limitations, and using technologies that fit these conditions are keys to create success mobile friendly Web content . The reasons for that include the challenges posed by network costs & delays, memory & Central Processing Unit (CPU) limitations, and keyboard & pointing devices differences. As importantly, mobile devices feature a growing set of advantages with their personal, always available nature, and the increasingly context-aware capabilities.
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) is now the most mature technology of using wireless for Internet access. Energy limitations of mobile devices are still an issue and to deal with this limitation, the wireless standard 802.11 includes a Power Saving Mode (PSM), but not much attention has been devoted by the research community to understand the performance in depth. PSM is able to save up to 90% of the energy spent when no energy management is used, however PSM is not the optimal solution for energy management. The objective of the 802.11 PSM is to let the wireless interface of a mobile host in the active mode only for the time necessary to exchange data, and turn it off in sleep mode whenever it becomes idle. In a Wi-Fi hotspot, this is achieved by exploiting the central role of the access point. Each mobile host within the hotspot lets the access point know whether it utilizes the PSM or not. Since the access point relays every frame from/to any mobile host, it buffers frames addressed to mobile hosts using the PSM every beacon interval, usually 100 ms, the access point broadcasts a special frame named beacon.
The mobile Web is still evolving and this is an exciting time of early development, but there are still some hurdles that need to be overcome. As seen familiar brands such as Facebook and MySpace porting their presences to the mobile domain, users will see a wider adoption of this channel by the mainstream. When creating content for mobile devices, the designers are usually confronted with numerous development standards and technologies to choose from. In addition, hundreds of different mobile devices with varying functional capabilities, screen resolutions, and sizes are under consideration as well as more than 40 distinct mobile browsers. This lack of uniformity renders testing mobile websites and applications for universal compatibility a near impossibility. Mobile Web developers also brave the high expectations of mobile Web users who anticipate the same caliber experience on their handsets that they enjoy on the desktop Web.
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The Web on the Move, Designing a Website for Mobile Users
The history of the web and web browser dates back to late 1980s, when a variety of technologies laid the foundation for the first web browser, World Wide Web was founded by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That was the starting of a new era the web and web browser brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies, at the first days browsing the web was text-based user interfaces when the graphic user interface (GUI) become more popular web browsers also move to GUI but all development of them was tend to the desktop users.
When technology grow fast and mobile devices became an important part from our daily life activities, and the need for access web from a mobile increases more and more, here we discover the problem that is the web was not developed for such devices, but there was many trials and contributions to enhance the access from such device, in this thesis we try to add a new contribution through providing some new techniques that try to solve such problem.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and mobile industry leaders are working together to developing best practices for creating mobile-friendly content and applications, enabling easy access to device descriptions, setting up test suites for increased interoperability of mobile browsers, and exploring ways to use the Web on mobile devices they try also to improve Web content production and access for mobile users and the greater web, The goal is that making Web site access from a mobile device as simple as Web site access from a desktop device, and this is what we called it the web on the move.
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What is the Mobile Web Mean?
Mobile Web refers to browser based web services such as the World Wide Web (www) by using WAP for mobile device such as a cell phone, PDA, or other portable connected device to a public network. Such access does not require a desktop computer or a fixed landline connection. The total number of mobile web users grew past the total number of PC based internet users for the first time in 2009 any web site accessed from a mobile device is mobile web, In 25 November, 2008 European communications write an article with title Mobile internet growth eight times greater than PC-based internet growth, says new analysis, this also tell us that the number of mobile web users become bigger than pc based users.
Mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. This is partly due to the incompatibility of the format of much of the information available on the Internet with mobile devices and partly due to the small physical size of the screens of mobile devices and other device limitations.
Mobile web access was commercially offered in Finland in 1996 on the Nokia Communicator 9000 phone on the Sonera and Radiolinja networks, this was the first access to the real internet. The first commercial launch of a mobile-specific browser based mobile web service was in 1999 in Japan when i-Mode was launched by NTT DoCoMo.
Now day mobile Web primarily utilizes lightweight pages written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limitations by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) commonly found on the desktop Web.
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