Chapter 5: Building Mobile-Friendly Sites
In This Chapter
Examining design and technical challenges
Discovering how to approach challenges for mobile content
Exploring the similarities and differences of websites and apps
It’s an increasingly mobile world out there. A quick survey of students walking across a campus or professionals at lunch will reinforce what statistics tell us: Mobile is a rapidly growing segment of the online viewing public. But the mobile audience is more important than just the number of people viewing sites on smartphones and tablets. Mobile users are a coveted demographic because studies show that mobile users shop online disproportionate to their numbers (in 2012, most analysts estimated mobile devices accounted for about 5 percent of web browsing activity worldwide).
Statistics are changing rapidly, and much of the emerging evidence is empirical, but, for example, in 2012, the CEO of Fab.com
(which sells trendy home décor) reported that 30 percent of visits to Fab.com were from mobile devices. An even more striking statistic was that mobile visitors were twice as likely to make a purchase at its company site compared with those visiting on desktop computers. ...
