Website Optimisation

Optimise to maximise

To maximise your site’s mobile web traffic, you might find it beneficial to optimise it for viewing from the Web Browser for S60 and Web Browser for Series 40.

There are several reasons optimisation may be beneficial:

• Mobile browsing habits differ from those seen in PC browsing.
• Mobile browsers have smaller screens.
• Mobile networks may present bandwidth limits.

For a general background on the issues, read Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 from the W3C Mobile Web Initiative.

If you would like to quickly evaluate your web page against mobile web best practices, you may want to run your site through the Mobiready free testing tool.

Create immediacy

The way in which users browse the internet on mobile devices is markedly different from their internet-browsing behaviour on PCs. With PCs, users generally have large screens and ample time to browse. They typically explore sites and jump from site to site to examine interesting or enticing links. Mobile users often have more-specific goals and less time for achieving them.

Websites optimised for mobile browsing need to make sure that the key information users will be looking for is easily accessible.

For more information, go to the Designing websites for S60 Browser section of the Web Developer’s Library.

Design for small screens

Mobile web browsing takes place on relatively small screens and uses navigation options that may be limited to scroll keys and a numeric keypad. An optimisation project therefore needs to consider whether a site can be easily navigated on a mobile device. Features, such as rollover links that work well on PCs, work poorly on mobile devices. In addition, by considering these issues, developers can make their websites as easy and pleasurable to use on mobile devices as they are in PC browsers.

Good mobile web design also makes the best possible use of media. Whether it is ensuring use of the best text layout and colour highlighting or the effective use of Flash technology, media optimisation is key to creating an engaging mobile web experience. For more information, go to the Creating web content section of the Web Developer’s Library.

A key tool in formatting content for small screens is CSS. To find out how to use CSS effectively on mobile sites, go to the Customizing style sheets for S60 section of the library.

Site navigation also needs special consideration in a mobile optimised site. The Managing user interaction section of the library includes information on a navigation aid and how to connect to a companion widget.

Consider resource constraints

Mobile devices and mobile networks offer a constrained environment compared with that of PC browsing on a broadband connection. As a result, the design of mobile web pages and their content need to take into account factors such as network bandwidth and latency as well as device processing capacity and battery life.

Practical strategies to address these constraints include transmitting only essential data and making effective use of caching. Also, the size of images can be reduced for mobile browsing, this not only decreasing the amount of data a mobile device has to download, but also eliminating the need for a device to scale images for rendering which reduces CPU demand and energy consumption.

For more information, go to the Device resource considerations section of the Web Developer’s Library.

Leverage CMS solutions

If your website uses either the Joomla! or phpBB content management system (CMS), you can use server-side plug-ins to reformat your content for optimal formatting in the Web Browser for S60 and Web Browser for Series 40.

For more information, go to the Server-side solutions section of the Web Developer’s Library.

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