Websites of the future

What is the next quantum leap in website design?

The Next Big Thing in web design? Designing for the mobile web! According to a 2009 report from global financial services giant Morgan Stanley, by 2014 more people will be accessing the Internet via smart phones than by personal or laptop computers. In fact, a significant number of the half a billion people worldwide who use their mobile phones to access the world wide web – including 25% of smart phone users in the US – even now don’t own any other Internet-enabled devices.

The mobile web presents aspiring designers with a number of challenges. Ideally design specifications should adhere to accessibility guidelines set out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.) But there are practical issues involved that make this difficult. Typically browsers designed to showcase wireless portals offer limited functionality, in order to accommodate the lower bandwidth and decreased memory capacity of many handheld devices. Many mobile browsers have difficulty reading JavaScript and the most recent version of the style sheet language (CSS 2.1) that determines the look and formatting of most web pages. This is changing, of course, as smart phones become increasingly technologically sophisticated. But Opera Mini, first launched in 2005, remains the most popular mobile browser worldwide even today.

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Other challenges to mobile web designers include:

• Mobile screens are not uniform either in size or resolution. The largest available screens tend to be 640 x 480; the average, however, is closer to 120 pixels.

While Android devices and the iPhone and iPad have full featured web browsers – Google Chrome and Apple Safari respectively – the screen sizes are small, which means that long text screeds which may be difficult for users to decipher should be avoided whenever possible. Mobile devices other than the ones above may not display your design as well. Currently Quarter Video Graphics Array (QVGA) at 240 x 320 is the most common resolution for phone displays and aspiring mobile designers would do well to use it as a standard.

• Loading images and information is often problematic because 3G speeds can be so inconsistent. 3G speeds are much faster than modem dial-up – but who uses modem dial-up anymore? Depending upon the phone carrier a user subscribes to and the network load at any one time, a phone may receive 500 kbps for a few seconds and then drop down to 50 500 kbps. This makes rendering graphic heavy sites problematic. The new standard in data transfer speeds is 4G, but its adaptation is far from universal at this point.

• The processing speed of a mobile device is much slower than laptops and personal computers, topping out for the most part at 1 GHz. This means that even if they have access to high broadband speeds, they don’t have the capacity to render them as quickly. The savvy mobile designer will use larger fonts, reduce the number of graphics and put important information at the very top of the web page in case transmission is interrupted.

• Quality assurance (QA) is a must when you’re designing for the mobile web because the Internet is a global medium and there is such a variety of web-enabled devices used worldwide. Even if you make an effort to QA your design across a multitude of mobile platforms, because there are so many mobile platforms there will always be one or two that you will miss. The simpler the design, the easier it will be to test – and the more likely it will be to render acceptably on those platforms your QA process isn’t able to test.

• Both the world wide web and mobile technology are characterized by the lightening speed by which they evolve. It’s very likely your technologically advanced design will be obsolete a mere six months after it’s launched. This is par for the course. If you’re an aspiring mobile web designer, you have to accept the fact that you will be updating your work at regular intervals to keep it up to date with industry trends and technologies.