The trend towards increased use of mobile devices on the Internet continues to grow unbroken. The combination of a small form factor and light weight on the one hand and the steadily growing performance (QuadCore tablets have already been announced) on the other have also led tablets to become more and more a multifunctional working tool. The preparation of a CMS for mobile user agents is often much more difficult in practice than it sounds. On the one hand, the CMS system has to adapt itself intelligently to the special features of the user agent. On the other hand, one should leave the user open the possibility to visit the full-sized desktop version of the website on his mobile micro device Providing touch-enabled navigation and dispensing with Flash up to the use of optimized Web Analytics code, the required adjustments are comparatively comprehensive and profound. For some CMSs, it is enough to set up appropriate extensions and install a mobile theme, but in other cases you will need at least manual adjustments.
Elastic side dimensions
It is not long ago that almost all websites had a common denominator: a standard resolution. This value was somewhere between 1024x768 and 1280x700 pixels. Nowadays there are screens in all sizes. The variety ranges from iPhones (and some even even smaller phones) to 24-inch all-in-one devices and 30-inch high-end displays to 60-inch HDTVs Br>
Comfortable navigation
To find a common denominator in size and form is a senseless undertaking. Rather, today's liquid layouts are in demand, which also react elegantly to the alignment of the display and to the changed dimensions of the view port. In order to support the growing array of mobile devices parallel to traditional desktop and laptop computers, a rethink is required. The dimensions of side elements should be defined whenever possible in elastic units such as ems. The same applies to the text size. This adaptation improves usability on displays like those of mobile devices. Already on the smallest tablet can be the desktop version of a website on the whole fairly comfortable view. The best example here would be the recently introduced Kindle Fire from Amazon. With its only 7-inch display, it lies between the dimensions of a smartphone and a tablet. An automatic switch to a mobile version of the smartphone site would not be appropriate.
Destination-friendly content
In addition to ever-growing aesthetic requirements and usability requirements, it is now necessary to take into account mouse-controlled user interfaces of desktops and laptops as well as touch screens of smartphones, netbooks and tablets. With CSS3, Javascript and HTML5 a common substructure is available for both types. Web designers were long used to provide buttons with hover states. As much as the concept makes sense on a mouse-driven interface, on a touchscreen it is not helpful. Analogue applies to classic drop-down menus, also these have been used on touch screens for reasons of usability. In order to make navigation accessible on touch-enabled devices, the use of a suitable framework is recommended. Web designers have to ensure that visitors can operate a website on the one hand with a mouse and keyboard, but on the other hand they can comfortably handle touch-enabled mobile devices with their fingertips. Last but not least, the mobile version of a website should also meet the criteria of accessibility so that its content can also be accessed via the screenreader.
Web Analytics for mobile devices
In order to utilize the limited space of mobile displays efficiently, headings, pictures or videos and flow text have to be weighted differently. Great emphasis is placed on the legibility of texts. Since many mobile micro devices - especially on the basis of iOS - do not support Flash, it is important to provide these devices with alternative content. This does not mean that you should do without Flash.Adobe Flash and AIR are still taboo on iOS devices, but on technically equivalent Android OS devices since Flash Player 10.3 an impressive good figure. With the GPU-accelerated Adobe Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3 even the interaction can be programmed at the highest speed. This shows, however, that Flash and the highest performance do not have to be excluded, but on the contrary, modern Flash and AIR versions on mobile devices offer the highest performance. Composing content for the mobile version of a website requires creativity and discipline. A good example is software downloads. By providing downloads for desktop applications as part of the mobile version of a website, one would go beyond the target, since these data can not be used anyway on a smartphone. It can make sense, however, to send the relevant downloads to the user as links via e-mail. An exception are HTML5 apps that run on mobile devices. Many web content providers or services now have their HTML5 apps available for download on their own website, one because they could not get access to the Apple App Store, the others Because they were not willing to pay a 30% fee for Apple in-app sales and to lose the customer data to Apple. So they bypass the Android and App Store and take direct contact with their mobile users Services or content. A prominent example of this strategy is the Financial Times magazine app.
Mobile small appliances may not know enough javascript to interact with Analytics software's data collection scripts. This concerns both Google Analytics and other solutions with Javascript-based tagging compressed content, including Adobe Omniture.Google provides for its own Analytics services server-side scripts in PHP (from version 5.x), JSP, ASP.NET and Perl under the Address code.google.com/mobile/analytics/. This code is installed on all pages that mobile web visitors receive, either directly in the code of that theme or using a plug-in through the plug-in interface of the CMS. In addition, you can control the behavior of the users of your HTML5 apps For mobile devices (as long as you can not identify the person). You can use Google's mobile apps SDKs for your iOS and Android apps: code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs /.
Smartphones are now as powerful as they were recently a desktop computer, but they are generally braked by the lower data transmission rates of the 3G radio networks. A particularly praiseworthy exception is currently Kindle Fire with Silk based on the split-browser architecture of Amazon. Thanks to the connection to Amazon's cloud services via the split-browser architecture, Amazon Silk also behaves in a 3G network Such as a desktop browser with broadband access to the Internet. When accessing a site through Silk on a Kindle Fire, the request goes to an Amazon datacenter, and Amazon's supercomputers then retrieve the required data from the web server through Amazon's backbone, resulting in customizations And deliver them optimally to the Kindle. This means that every access on average takes about 5 instead of the usual 100 milliseconds. Within a few seconds, Amazon's EC2 services are able to tailor the size of images, e-books, PDFs or videos to the needs of the Kindle user Such as CSS stylesheets and javascript scripts, to minimize and "gzip" them to reduce the number of HTTP requests and the required bandwidth. The result is a fast page setup even when accessing third-generation mobile communications.
Established CMS are now trying to grab the mobile side of the site with mobile themes and optimized plug-ins. Users of Joomla are offered a free solution called Mobile Joomla with support for iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Nokia (mobilejoomla.com). Web sites based on WordPress can be optimized using an optimized theme for mobile devices. The best solutions in this category include jQuery Mobile, Newspress Mobile, Carrington Mobile and iPhonesta Mobile WordPress Theme as well as WordPress Mobile Theme Pack. Mobile Joomla provider: mobilejoomla.com Compatibility: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia
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Data throughput and performance
Mobile-friendliness in the CMS
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