Take Your Site Mobile – Mobify Webinar
It’s that time again! A new live webinar is coming this Thursday, Oct 28 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET. Mark your calendars! If you’re just getting started with Mobify or would like to brush up on your mobile design, we’d love to have you join us!
We are very excited and are looking forward to getting a chance to see all of you! Can’t make it this Thursday? No problem! You can find all our recorded webinars on our blog! Hope to see you all this Thursday!
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Taking WordPress Mobile – Watch the Mobify Webinar
For those of you who missed our webinar last week, here is the recorded version where we show how easy it is to take a WordPress site mobile using Mobify.
Stay tuned for more details on our next webinar and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter (@mobify) for the latest updates!
Closing the Gap: Media Queries & Mobile Web Apps
A recent article by James Pearce started a great conversation in the mobile web technology circles. Are media queries, a CSS technique for optimizing desktop content for multi-platform display, sufficient for day-to-day mobile web design? Or should mobile web apps, with brand new interfaces powered by Sencha or JQueryMobile, be adopted more broadly? Media queries are faster to use, but the mobile context isn’t addressed well. Mobile web apps take longer and don’t integrate nicely with the desktop website structure, but can produce a truly “mobile” interface.
At Mobify, we’ve been thinking about these tough questions for a while. One of our fundamental beliefs is that web links are sacred – content, functionality & advertising should be usable on one URL for all platforms. If a mobile web app is built from scratch, it should know exactly what the user wants depending on the link they clicked, not load its homescreen every visit. Doing this right takes time – time which web designers around the world often don’t have.
Our goal with Mobify Studio is to make the mobile web beautiful for everyone. Everyone should get a chance to quickly mobify their content much like media queries do, then grow the mobile experience with functionality such as new HTML blocks, JavaScript widgets or mobile ad tags. It’s very likely that 99% of the new websites made in the last 24 hours had no mobile optimization whatsoever. If a year from now this number comes down to 95%, we’ll all be better off.
So go ahead, try the Studio (the Basic tier is free) and tell us what you think!
Mobify Weekly – The Latest Threads in the Mobile Web
Welcome to the new edition of Mobify Weekly! Here are some cool links that we’ve run across during the week! Enjoy!
70 Per Cent of European Users Prefer the Mobile Web To Apps Hearing news like this makes us very happy. We hope that sites powered by Mobify had something to do with this!
Mobile Internet to Surpass Desktop Web Use in Four Years This just sounds like pure optimism until it’s coupled with some of the metrics that we’ve covered on here before. Then it becomes shocking how real this prognosis is.
Smartphones Dominate! New Gartner report shows that smartphones are dominating their counterparts in terms of web and app usage. We’re excited because it means more support for cutting edge mobile web technologies.
Opera and Netsweeper Partnership Announced This would allow wireless carriers to filter websites inappropriate for certain audiences on handsets equipped with Opera Mini. We’d love to hear your opinions on this. Post your thoughts below!
We’re also got some very exciting news about working with Nielsen. Stay tuned for details!
Have a fantastic long weekend and see you next time!
Better Browsers Alone Will Not Solve the Mobile Problem
“Ignorance is bliss” the saying goes and it has definitely been true when it comes to adapting websites for mobile access. The Web wizards of the Silicon Valley didn’t have mobile internet before the iPhone, hence designing for mobile never occurred to them as an important problem. Once equipped with iPhones, many assumed that the device is so good, their sites require no specific design work. The sites look OK right? They might, but that’s not nearly good enough!
Web browsing on mobile shouldn’t be a scavenger hunt.
Best-of-breed WebKit browsers offer an outstanding technical platform, but the best they can do is provide the user with a “keyhole” view of the desktop website. Sure, everything works, but the experience is hardly optimal. Content crucial for mobile (maps, phones numbers, schedules) is hidden away in the remote parts of the site. Content that’s less relevant for mobile (big content segments, legacy plugins, etc) is prominently featured and takes ages to download. Publishers that really care about their users will certainly strive to do better.
Mobify is the answer to the problem that a browser’s can’t solve. It’s not possible for a machine to certainly know what is the current intent of both the user and the site creator. A human designer must make a few quick choices about the mobile view of their site. Mobify is the only service that enables this creative freedom.
