With the advent of smartphone and tablet PC, people are becoming more mobile with their browsing habits. I have noticed this on my stat program. Mobile browsers now account for roughly 6% of my visitors.
I think these are pretty significant numbers and I also believe that these numbers will only increase in the future.
The sad part is that I do not own any smartphone or tablet computer. So my question is how will you know if your website is compatible with mobile browsers? Is there a way to check using my desktop computer on how my site looks like in these mobile devices?
That’s not the whole story though. Your site might look fine in mobile browsers – most modern smartphones do a good job of replicating a desktop display, although older or less high-tech phones might need a display that is mobile-friendly – but that doesn’t mean it will work on mobiles. Remember that the ways of interacting are different – there’s no :hover or onMouseOver or tooltips, often no click-and-drag, there may not be any right-click, Javascript support may be flaky, and Flash won’t work on any iDevice or iGadget.
If your site has a very simple interaction model, where people just click on links and buttons and all actions are carried out by standard HTML, then you should be fine, because all phones support that. If that’s the case then checking that the site looks fine should be enough. But if you’ve got anything more complex than that, there really is no substitute for getting hold of a real smartphone and checking it out for yourself.
Which is why all the goofy ‘scripting for nothing’ nonsense (most of what jquery brings to the table) IMHO has no place on websites in the first place.
It’s also why if you ARE going to do all the goofy scripted nonsense, you should do using ‘progressive enhancement’ – scripting should ENHANCE the functionality, not supplant it.
Dynamic content, dynamic fonts, semantic markup, separation of presentation from content, media targets – use them and you’re good. Sleaze out a PSD, slice it up and write nothing but presentational markup where the only thing that ‘matters’ to you is the goofy pretty graphics at a crappy fixed width desktop size – GOOD LUCK!
This is another online testing site that allows you to enter a URL so that it can perform a set of evaluations, including Page Test, Markup Test and Site Test of the web page.
The dotMobi emulator gives you a live preview of your site from a (fairly small, to be honest) range of different mobile phones. This mobile testing tool is great if you need to test your page on older mobile devices.