News

Plus the Strengths of Firefox OS and Apple's New A7 Chip Rumors

Plus Amazon's Silk browser updated and Yahoo! release new Chrome toolbar

Plus Google release new guidelines for mobile optimisation and Firefox 23 has finally been released.

Plus WordPress releases version 3.6 and Google Chrome gains even more market share.

Plus Microsoft release Internet Explorer Windows 7 developer preview and Wikipedia launch support for editing content on mobile devices.

51Degrees.mobi has been selected as a finalist in the Mobile Entertainment Awards. Here is why we think we should win!

We're highlighting the importance of good web site performance on mobile phones by launching our competition to find the web's heaviest site.

We want to you to think about mobile web performance, and to share your thoughts with friends and colleagues. That's why there's a $1000 prize for the heaviest web site entered, and a $300 prize draw for sharing the competition. The heaviest 5 web sites will be given a free copy of 51Degrees.mobi tools. How will your web site perform?

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.

The CMA Annual Conference 2013 will be hosting talks and discussions around the topic of harnessing the digital economy.

This year James Rosewell, Founder and CEO of 51Degrees will be one of 3 innovative SME speakers to discuss how their businesses have allowed other companies to become successful in the digital landscape.

I've just received a fantastic piece of marketing from EpiServer titled "What Consumers Want From Digital News Publishers". The white paper benchmarks 12 of the UKs leading news publishers, according to the ABCs: National dailies, March 2013, against a set of criteria, including web site mobile performance, for iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

I was interested to find out how many of the top performing web sites used server side device detection techniques. Here's my quick and dirty findings.