Mobile Web

As much as web sites need to cater for a number of browsers, they now need to cater for a number of devices as more and more people are using their mobile phones, PDAs and other mobile devices to connect to the Internet. However, visits from mobile devices are likely to be quite different to visits from PCs. Visits from mobile phone users are likely to be more purpose driven or task specific, as opposed to leisurely browsing from PCs.

Just as with PCs, mobile phones can have different operating systems and different browsers, both affecting the way that web sites and web pages are viewed and used. In addition to this, web pages are viewed on far smaller (and non-standard) screens, and navigation is controlled through a keyboard or limited scrolling device. There are also a number of different ways that mobile phones and devices connect to the Internet. In particular, mobile phones can use either the GSM network (where access is via GPRS, EDGE or 3G, depending on availability) or Wifi enabled devices can connect to wireless networks.

WAP stands for Wireless Application Protocol and is a technology platform aimed at making web sites accessible to mobile phones, despite the small screens and keypad limitations. WAP is essentially a wireless data connection and browser that can read a pared down version of HTML. If a phone has only WAP access, it can only access web sites that have been developed for this type of access.

More sophisticated phones and devices, and increasingly almost all phones sold are falling into this category, can use HTML browsers that have been specifically designed for mobile phones. These are pared down versions of browsers that run on PCs or notebooks, and have been specifically designed to take into account the limitations of mobile devices. In particular, browsers need to accommodate both the low bandwidth and the low memory capacity of mobile devices. Mobile browsers also need to cater for the navigation limitations of mobile devices as well as the fact that navigation is not standard across the various models of phones.

When it comes to web sites and mobile phones, there are three options for webmasters:

• Do nothing and hope that the web experience is not too painful for mobile visitors.
• Make sure that your web site is built using W3C compliant CSS so that it can be more easily navigated by mobile visitors.  
• Build a separate version of your web site tailored to mobile visitors.

For certain kinds of web sites, there are “quick fixes” that allow a mobile version of the web site to be created fairly easily. For example, http://mobilepress.co.za/ from Younique allows for web sites and blogs based on the WordPress platform to be made mobile browser friendly. A quick search on Google will also give instructions on how to make small changes to your code in order to create a mobile friendly version of a website.