Blogs

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?

Premium Device Detection Data and Lite Device Detection Data is now available to download.

Offering a great mobile experience to your website users isn't just about creating an optimised user interface. Performance is also a critical component when developing for mobile, enabling your content to load as quickly as possible for any device.

Part of the mobile performance problem lies within web pages being too heavy, slowing down loading times on mobile connections. But how do we test our website to understand how to optimise for performance? Read this blog to find out how.

51Degrees Mobile Detector for Python provides information about the device, operating system and browser accessing your website. I have created a easy to follow example to get you going using the 51Degrees.mobi Python solution with an example Django website.

More and more hardware vendors are releasing 'Phablet' devices into the market, with HTC and Acer being the newest companies to jump on the bandwagon. This week 51Degrees.com take a look at how mobile phone screen sizes browsing the web have changed over the last 20 months.

NFC (Near Field Communication) was a big focus at this years Mobile World Congress back in February, but have adoption rates increased since then? 51Degrees take a look at web traffic from NFC enabled devices.

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.

Last week Google announced their plans to push websites into offering great mobile web experiences. With this announcement came some controversy over Google's preferred method of mobilisation. This blog explains the reality of Google's "endorsement".

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.