2. Mobile Usage is Growing Rapidly!
By 2013 it is estimated that more people will
access websites through mobile phones than
through desktop computers…
3. The New Standard
Smartphones are
expected to out-ship the
global PC market in 2012
It’s time to upgrade your website at http://www.ProToolsHelp.com to be more mobile-friendly! Here’s why…
Mobile usage is one of the fastest-growing trends in the technology sector. The portability and low price point of mobile devices allows access to a greater number of users. This trend shows no sign of slowing.
84% of users use their smart phone at home80% Use their smart phone at miscellaneous times throughout the day74% Use their smartphone while waiting in line64% Use their smartphone at workHowever, mobile users have a very high bounce rate.
Tablets are also becoming more ubiquitous. Apple has broken several records recently with respect to how many units they’ve sold. It’s been rumored that the demand might actually exceed the supply, and Apple is having trouble keeping up with all of its orders. Apple currently has more cash on hand than the U.S. government by the way…
You can see that around 2009 Apple sales really began to take off. As you can see, sales were in the $150 BILLION range as of 2011. This is not accounting for the market presence of other competing tablet devices. Apple currently has the highest market share in this product line.
Facebook is the number #2 most visited website in the entire world. It enjoys over 550 Million daily views. There are more than 100 Million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. It is interesting to note that the mobile users are actually TWICE as active on Facebook than non-mobile users.
Not all mobile devices share a common platform. As a result, not all mobile devices render the content in exactly the same way. Apple held the top spot in the smart phone category for some time, but now Android is gaining lots of market share as well. Sadly, the Blackberry is losing market share at an alarming rate.
Because of the lack of universal standards, web designers are now faced with the headache of trying to make content accessible by all user agents. In the past, the primary focus was to develop the main website first, and the mobile site was a bit of an afterthought. I am here to suggest that it should be the other way around. Build the mobile site first, and use that as a basis to build a regular site.
HTML5 adds some new features to the HTML markup language which are beneficial to most browsers. The web browsing experince is enhanced with more dynamic content, faster load times, and easy video encoding. The dark side to all of this, is not all web browsers understand HTML5.
Mobile design should be clean and succinct. Here are 2 examples of a good-looking mobile site. One is Facebook which has been wildly successful. The other is for indie band “The Skeletones” from Riverside, California. You see that the text is easy to read, and there is no unnecessary clutter.
This what you don’t want to see. I chose these two sites as examples of poor mobile experience. The Cracked website looks entirely cluttered and doesn’t look much different from the regular website. Surfing this site on a mobile device would be a nightmare. The 2nd site I chose is a site my friend built and is currently beta-testing. His mobile site also looks a lot like the original, and you can see that some of the formatting doesn’t look quite right. To be fair, I don’t think his user persona is geared toward the mobile demographic, as the primary focus of this site is to stream movies. Nonetheless, it would be wise to make more mobile-friendly site. Especially with respect to the tablet market. The fact that Flash is not supported on the iPhone should be a concern as well.
