Mobile Awesomeness Blog

Have you ever wondered what percentage of your website traffic is visiting from a mobile device? Wonder no more with Percent Mobile. 

Google recently announced much better support in Analytics for tracking mobile websites. Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to install it.

Wapple is another premier mobile framework at the disposal of web developers these days. The great thing about frameworks is that you can be sure your mobile site works across thousands of devices, and device detection should be spot on. It's a great way to go if you are limited on time, budget or desire to do extensive mobile device/browser testing.

Wapple offers three public business packages, ranging from roughly $150 USD/month to roughly $1,400 USD/month. Free trials are available, and for developers they have a program that gives unlimited access to their API for free. So it's definitely on the high end of the price spectrum, but they have some serious technology to backup the price.

The 3 Wapple products are slightly confusing at first, because all of them are included with any package. Canvas is a GUI, which allows creation of a mobile website using simple drag-and-drop tools. Coders wanting control of their own HTML/CSS won't be disappointed either.

The other two products, Architect and Exhibit are what separates Wapple from other mobile frameworks. Architect allows developers to mobilize their current website or application using Wapple's proprietary, XML-based language, called WAPL.

The beauty of using WAPL markup is when it calls on the other product, Exhibit. Exhibit profiles the device by handset, hardware/firmware, browser, carrier and more to deliver your website content in a form that is truly optimized for the device, whether the output is WML, CHTML, XHTML or HTML. You create ONE site, and Exhibit optimizes it for every available device with the most advanced profiling available. It eliminates the need for extensive testing across various mobile handsets and browsers.

While Wapple is more expensive than it's counterparts Mobify and MoFuse, their advanced tools give developers great control over the user experience, with minimal time invested. I'd like to see SSL security available as an option for all accounts, and MANY more page impressions included with an account. Paying $150/month for only 500 page views per day won't cut it for most websites or applications. All that aside, it is a really well-done platform that is certainly worth a look.

Mobify is another fantastic platform available to website creators that does most of the heavy lifting if you want a quality mobile experience for your users. Thanks to mobile platforms like this one (others listed here), gone are the days when you have to hire a mobile expert or web developer to have a mobile site that works across various platforms.

What differentiates it from platforms like MoFuse (reviewed last week) is flexibility with regards to the design and layout. Although Mobify is hosted, it gives you complete control over the mobile stylesheets. Combine the style control with an extremely helpful interface that makes it painfully simple to select what elements you want as part of the mobile site, and you can see why major websites are taking notice and using this platform. Among them are A List Apart, McDonald's and Spin Magazine, among others.

Like most other players in this space, they have a basic free account, and I believe monthly pricing as well. I would expand on the pricing, but it was surprisingly nowhere available on the website. For an introduction to the platform, check out this video:

View more screencasts here.

MoFuse is a mobile platform that pretty much anyone can use to create a mobile version of their website. Actually, it took about 15 minutes to create one for our site until we have the opportunity to do it up right. They have a really nice dashboard where you can setup design details, add pages, view analytics and more. Blogs with up to 2 feeds/pages are free, and their premium subscription ranges from $39/month to $199/month.

If you want unlimited control and customizations for your mobile site, this is not the platform for you. However, if you want something simple, easy to create and instantly compatible with 4,500+ devices, MoFuse is for you. For more, check out the tour, or create a free site here.

There's a new mobile javascript framework on the block, which will join popular frameworks like iui. It is called jQTouch, and as you might imagine, it's a jQuery plug-in just for mobile WebKit browsers, like the one on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Visit the website and you can signup for email updates as the framework grows.

PhoneGap is an ambitious open source project that strives to help developers build platform-independent mobile applications using HTML and Javascript. For any web developer, this is music to our ears! And the beautiful thing is ... it works. This framework is a game-changer in the iPhone and mobile web development space.

Writing anything further simply would not do this project justice, so watch this video and learn about it in their words:

Recently we were sent a new mobile resource that has a really interesting business model, and could be a huge benefit to developers not wanting to spend days optimizing for all the various mobile handsets.

The site is called Mobile Elements. Basically you create a website using standard XHTML, then call their various APIs, which will optimize your code for mobile handsets based on their extensive device database of literally thousands of phones.

The service also gives you the ability to override any of the device profiles in order to make your site display perfectly. Although a little pricey for most websites right now, we think it's a wicked cool idea. 

Mobile stylesheets and mobile browser detection is all well and good. We can all agree it is easier to implement, and it's better than nothing. But in 2009 it is simply not enough if you want a high success rate with users.

What's the problem? Well, there are 2:

1. Mobile phone networks (for the most part) are not fast enough. Although you can make a site look great with a mobile stylesheet, it still takes seemingly forever to download the full page content as if it were being displayed in a computer browser.

2. Not everyone has an unlimited data plan. Don't force them to download 250kb of data when all they need to see is 25kb of it. Many mobile users still pay by the kilobyte or megabyte.

In Jacob Nielsen's recent article about mobile web usability in 2009, he makes the case for having a separate mobile website all together. He lists the reasons above, along with some other compelling information collected from their usability tests.

If you are about to take on a mobile website project, you should seriously consider the benefits of building a 100% separate version. Your audience will thank you!

Our friends at Smashing Magazine just posted an article outlining Mobile Web Design Trends for 2009, and they make a nice mention of our site. They found tons of fantastic mobile web design resources, many of which we will add to our own Mobile Web Resources page. So go check it out!