Development

Understanding what devices are browsing your website and their capabilities is key to optimising your website for mobile. I have put together some small code examples showing how you can gain this sort of knowledge using 51Degrees Device Detection, allowing you to fully optimise your mobile users web experience.

51Degrees Mobile Theme Switcher for Drupal allows you to take existing content and offer it to mobile users with an optimised theme. You can quickly, easily and cost-effectively optimise your Drupal website for mobile performance by following this blog.

Google have recently announced they will soon change the algorithms they use to determine a websites mobile page rank. These changes will penalise webmasters who have not properly considered the increasing legions of mobile users.

Google's recommendations consist of three officially supported configurations

1. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
2. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
3. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device.

All 3 configurations are equally valid. This blog post summarises the important considerations to optimise for end users and search engines.

Developing websites to accommodate for mobile devices has now become standard practice. However, what happens when developers need to determine between different mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, e-readers, games consoles etc)?

IsEmailBrowser is a new beta property that has been added to the 51Degrees.mobi property library. IsEmailBrowser can be used to indicate whether a HTTP request was sent from an email client or from a regular browser.

51Degrees.mobi Detector for PHP ensures that the Premium Data file is kept up to date by offering an update feature that will download and apply any new data released by 51Degrees.mobi. Unfortunately, a vanilla PHP install will only respond to web requests, so cannot be made to update by itself regularly.

This guide outlines how to create a Cron job to automatically update your Premium Data file in a PHP environment.

Review the slides from my recent web seminar with Kentico on the Future Web Design – Mobiles, Tablets, TVs and Glasses.

Responsive Web Design allows designers to implement web pages which work equally well on different types of devices. Cascading Style Sheets 3 (CSS3) media queries enable the CSS used to control the page look and feel to be altered based on screen size, and other properties of the device when the page is being rendered on the browser. Responsive Design works really well with simple web pages containing elements that are implemented consistently across the major browser vendors.

There are two technical approaches that can be used to detect mobile devices: On-Premise and Cloud based. This blog explains the advantages and disadvantages of each and provides free source code to enable you to evaluate which solution is right for your organisation.

At 51Degrees.mobi we aim to retrieve accurate information about every device that we use in our database. Our professional team use a combination of sources including: Official websites and technical documents, unofficial mobile news websites and physical devices to create the most comprehensive list of device properties available.