Mastering Mobile Web

May 15, 2012 Pivotal Labs

Creating a mobile website can be challenging. Here’s a simple breakdown of how to make your mobile website a success from a development-standpoint. The theme? Keep it simple. This is true for all development efforts but especially true on mobile. One of our resident mobile website experts breaks it down here:

  • Resize. Mobile devices don’t have the power of desktops so you have to reign in the size and complexity of your DOM and the javascript that makes it work. If you do the simplest things that get the job done, you’ll find your site performs well not just on the latest and greatest devices, but for the other 80 per cent of people that haven’t upgraded yet.
  • Keep the UI simple. Your device is a lot smaller than a desktop. You can only really lay things out vertically; so if you try to cram the same amount of information that you can find on a desktop page into a mobile device, your eyes and thumbs will get tired quickly.
  • Keep the code simple. This applies to both the back and front end. When you need to make things behave differently to provide better support for a different class of devices, it’s a lot easier to change the behaviour of a simple codebase than something that’s over-engineered.

About the Author

Biography

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