Mobile Web - Innovative Design And Advanced Development!

By Author: Lucy Newman
Total Articles: 25
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The number of mobile users is growing substantially in comparison to PC users. This growth has led various companies to explore another level of business development. Everyday new technologies are introduced to make Mobile a possible alternative to Personal Computer. Being a leader in Digital Communication industry, mobile phones have opened a new set of standards for digital content providers. Apart from calling, features like SMS, MMS, Email, Mobile Shopping and Money Transfer have made mobile an indispensable gadget of 21st century. With the emergence of high speed wireless network technologies and the growing market penetration of cell phones the global advertising industry's interest in using this communication platform as a medium of marketing and advertisement is in rise. Though mobile technology has been quite advanced, yet the Web Experience for mobile users is still a matter of concern. The problem is with the new set of web standards for mobile, which are completely different from web experience through PCs and Laptops. You would surprise to know how addictive the world has become from the following statistics:

...
... * 1996 - GSM phones in 103 countries
* 2000 - 10 million i-mode users (Japan)
* 2002 - 1 billion mobile phone users worldwide
* 2009 - 3 billion mobile phone users worldwide

Another surprising fact is that in the UK, there are more mobile phones than users. As the Mobile Internet continues to grow there is a growing need to provide users with effective Web Browsing Facility. Further we will explore that the standard Web Browsing Trends, Digital Content Standards and the Interface Limitations of mobile devices.

Presently, the most serious problem for mobile web designers is with design and standards issues. This might be the reason behind the delaying adaptation of Mobile as successor to PCs and Laptops. Further, mobile search engines are themselves very new and a lot of technological efforts still need to be put into. But the thing is, developing a great web experience for mobile users is much easier. Here follows seven simple tactics that will help you avoid the early drawbacks that have caused many other mobile sites to fail:

Don't Mix Up Your Markup

Earlier users used to browse only WAP sites. Most of the WAP sites use Wireless Markup Language (WML) as its markup language. WML is an XML markup language. XHTML can too have a very good alternative to XML. Most built-in phone browsers these days can handle XHTML just fine. A mobile phone recognizes two flavors of HTML:

* XHTML — the same, basic XHTML rendered by desktop web browsers
* XHTML-MP — the MP here stands for Mobile Profile

Screen Size and Resolution Issues

A mobile web designer should deal with different screen sizes and resolutions, but also different shapes of mobiles. After closely examining several mobile phones, we have found four basic screen sizes:

* 128 x 160 pixels
* 176 x 220 pixels
* 240 x 320 pixels
* 320 x 480 pixels

Knowing these screen dimensions helps you optimize some of your web content, however it's advisable to keep the size and style of your site as minimal and linear as you can.

Validate Your Markup

A mobile browser generally won't have the luxury of a 2 GHz processor and 100MB of disk space. So a minor HTML error can make browsing difficult for users. For that reason, you must check, validate, and recheck your markup, time and time again to ensure that your mobile web pages are 100% perfect.