Trends show that the Mobile web is now becoming a constant in people’s lives, all the more so with the recent explosion of Social Media adoption. According to a Nielsen report, the number of people accessing the internet on the mobile has shown an year-over-year increase of 34% for the years 2009 to 2010. Between 2009 and 2010, mobile data traffic has increased 159 percent, and grew 4.2 times faster than standard broadband traffic in 2010. A cisco study projects 26-Fold Growth in Global Mobile Data Traffic From 2010 to 2015.
With Social Media becoming an integral part of the marketing mix and with mobile marketing expanding beyond just messaging to mature into a viable marketing channel, it is important for the mobile experience to cross the threshold at providing a seamless transition from the “tethered” desktop experience. A dedicated ‘mobile’ version of your website that follows the Mobile Web Best Practices would thus be the norm than the exception in the future.
A recent post by Pierre Far in the Google Webmaster Central Blog made for some interesting reading on how best to structure your website for mobile phones, how it interacts with Googlebot-Mobile, the search engine spider that crawls mobile content and how Google may modify your webpages for an improved mobile experience.
More context down below on mobile website concepts and best practices that can boot strap your efforts to ensure that your mobile websites provide your users, the best browsing experience.