Web Site Mobilization Techniques

Author(s):  
John Christopher Sandvig

Mobile-friendly web sites are designed to render well on all digital devices, including smartphones, desktop computers, laptop computers, and tablets. Creating a user-friendly experience on mobile devices require specific web design techniques. These techniques are designed to accommodate the small screens and other physical limitations of mobile devices. This article describes the three primary techniques for creating mobile-friendly web sites: responsive, separate URL, and server adaptive. It explains how each technique is implemented, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and their relative popularity. It also describes an emerging mobile technique called Accelerated Mobile Pages.

Author(s):  
John Christopher Sandvig

Mobile-friendly websites are designed to render well on all digital devices, including smartphones, desktop computers, laptop computers, and tablets. Creating a user-friendly experience on mobile devices requires specific web design techniques. These techniques are designed to accommodate the small screens and other physical limitations of mobile devices. This chapter describes the three primary techniques for creating mobile-friendly web sites: responsive, separate URL, and server adaptive. It explains how each technique is implemented, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and their relative popularity. It also describes an emerging mobile technique called accelerated mobile pages.


Author(s):  
Yinghui Yang

It is hard to organize a website such that pages are located where users expect to find them. Consider a visitor to an e-Commerce website in searching for a scanner. There are two ways he could find information he is looking for. One is to use the search function provided by the website. The other one is to follow the links on the website. This chapter focuses on the second case. Will he click on the link “Electronics” or “Computers” to find the scanner? For the website designer, should the scanner page be put under Electronics, Computers or both? This problem occurs across all kinds of websites, including B2C shops, B2B marketplaces, corporate web-sites and content websites. Through web usages mining, we can automatically discover pages in a website whose location is different from where users expect to find them. This problem of matching website organization with user expectations is pervasive across most websites. Since web users are heterogeneous, the question is essentially how to design a website so that majority of the users find it easy to navigate. Here, we focus on the problem of browsing within a single domain/web site (search engines are not involved since it’s a totally different way of finding information on a web site.) There are numerous reasons why users fail to find the information they are looking for when browse on a web site. Here in this chapter, we focus on the following reason. Users follow links when browsing online. Information scent guides them to select certain links to follow in search for information. If the content is not located where the users expect it to be, the users will fail to find it. How we analyze web navigation data to identify such user browsing patterns and use them to improve web design is an important task.


2008 ◽  
pp. 3410-3429
Author(s):  
Jack S. Cook ◽  
Laura Cook

Web accessibility is really not a technological issue but rather a cultural problem. A Web site is said to be Web accessible if anyone, regardless of capabilities or disabilities, using any kind of Web browsing technology to visit the site has full and complete access to the site’s content and has the ability to interact with the site if required. If properly planned from the start, a Web site can be functional, accessible and aesthetically pleasing. This chapter focuses on ensuring access to information available on the Internet. The overall objective is to increase awareness of Web accessibility issues by providing rationale for why Web designers should be interested in creating accessible sites. Specifically, this chapter identifies some of the emerging digital barriers to accessibility encountered by those with disabilities. Current efforts to address these barriers legally are identified and their effectiveness for breaking down barriers is discussed. The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is discussed, followed by a study of the 50 most visited Web sites. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of this topic and future developments.


Author(s):  
Khaled Ahmed Nagaty

In this article the author explained the classes of e-commerce business models and their advantages and disadvantages. He discussed the important issues and problems facing e-commerce web sites and how to build a successful e-commerce Web site using techniques of security, privacy and authentication, guidelines of maintenance, collecting user’s information for personalization, using multi-tier architecture to achieve high performance and high availability.


2011 ◽  
pp. 522-540
Author(s):  
Rui Lopes ◽  
Konstantinos Votis ◽  
Luís Carriço ◽  
Spiridon Likothanassis ◽  
Dimitrios Tzovaras

The Web serves as the principal mediator for information sharing and communication on a worldwide scale. Its highly decentralized nature affords a scale free growth, where each endpoint (i.e., Web site) is created and maintained independently. Web designers and developers have the onus of making sure that users can interact without accessibility problems. However, coping with users with disabilities poses challenges on how to ensure that a Web site is accessible for any kind of user. When (and if) this is done, designers and developers do it in a post-hoc way, (i.e., verify and tweak Web sites according to guidelines such as WCAG). In this Chapter the authors present SWAF, the Semantic Web Accessibility Framework, a base framework for supporting the integration of accessibility services into Web design and development processes. SWAF affords both tailoring accessibility to user needs and specifying the semantic validation of accessibility guidelines in different application situations.


Author(s):  
J. Christopher Sandvig

The growing use of mobile devices for e-commerce, news, social media, and web search has created a need for mobile-friendly web sites. Mobile sites are designed to accommodate the physical limitations of mobile devices such as small displays, touch screens, and slow download times. Mobile-friendly sites typically display content in a single column formatted to use the full screen width, utilize vertical scrolling, use smaller images, provide larger touch targets such as buttons and links, and utilize space saving navigation techniques. The objectives of this article are to describe the attributes of mobile friendly web sites, overview current popular mobile design techniques, and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.


Author(s):  
Dimitrios Xanthidis ◽  
David Nicholas ◽  
Paris Argyrides

This chapter is the result of a two years effort to design a template aiming at standardizing, as much as such a task is feasible, the evaluation of Web sites. It is the product of a few publications in international conferences and journals. A thorough review of the international literature on the subject led the authors to conclude there is a very large number of opinions, thoughts and criteria from different professionals involved, directly or indirectly, with the process of designing a good Web site. To make matters even more complicated there are a number of different terms used by various scholars, scientists and professionals around the world that often refer to similar, if not the same, attributes of a Web site. However, it seems that all these differences could boil down to a systematic approach, here called evaluation template, of 53 points that the design strategies of the Web sites should be checked against. This template was tested on a significant number (232) of Web sites of Greek companies and proved it can be used to evaluate the quality of Web sites not only by technology experts but by non-experts alike. The evaluation template, suggested here, is by no means the solution to the problem of standardizing the process of evaluating a Web site but looking at other work done on the subject worldwide it is a step ahead.


2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 628-644 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivana Pažur

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to get an insight in users’ opinion on library resources/services on small screen mobile devices. Objectives were to establish which types of small screen mobile devices are used and to find out is there a tendency for using academic and educational contents on such devices. Furthermore, aim was to identify whether the users need mobile friendly library web site and services at all. Also, what library resources/services and to what extent respondents consider as the important ones for mobile friendly customization. Finally the results would serve as an orientation in building mobile friendly library web site and services. The author believed that the users were still unaware of the possibility of accessing library web sites and services through mobile devices in general; therefore, this survey also had a role of raising awareness and stimulating their interest. Design/methodology/approach – The survey was focussed on small screen mobile devices with screen size up to seven inches (17.1 cm). Data collection was performed through a questionnaire containing ten questions. The questionnaire was created by LimeSurvey tool, and for mobile optimized version SurveyMonkey.com service was used too. The authors received 295 questionnaires, out of which 285 were taken into account. Findings – The survey found that the largest number of respondents own smartphone/tablet/phablet. The results show that small screen devices are, to some extent, used for educational, academic and informational purposes (reading of e-books and e-journals, education, data checking, internet searching and searching of handy information), but non-academic purposes still predominate (texting, reading e-mails, phone calls, taking pictures). Overall 64 percent of the respondents has expressed need for small screen mobile devices customized library resources/services, but there are 30 percent of undecided respondents. Croatian Scientific Bibliography, e-journals database (EZB), online databases, contact information and lecture halls reservations, has been resources/services requested by respondents to be available in a mobile friendly mode. Originality/value – The survey examines users’ opinion on a new library service before its implementation. Besides giving us a precise insight into the Rudjer Bošković Institute library users’ interest and needs for mobile friendly customization of existing library resource/service, survey gives a unique insight into the correlation of age and gender of the respondents and their answers to the question about having a small screen mobile device and opinion about the customization of library resources and services. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first users’ survey on this topic in Croatia.


First Monday ◽  
2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rashika Tasnim Keya ◽  
Pietro Murano

In this paper a novel and significant study into the usability of carousel interaction in the context of desktop interaction is presented. Two equivalent prototypes in an e-commerce context were developed. One version had a carousel and the other version did not have a carousel. These were then compared with each other in an empirical experiment with 40 participants. The data collected were statistically analysed and overall results showed that in terms of performance the Web site version without carousel outperformed the version with carousel. Furthermore, the subjective preferences of the participants were strongly in favour of the without carousel version of the site. The results of this study make an important contribution to knowledge suggesting that in many cases implementing a carousel is not the best design decision. The results of this paper are particularly significant in relation to desktop versioned Web sites and goal-driven tasks. Serendipitous-type tasks and mobile versioned web sites used on mobile devices with touch screens were not part of the scope of this work.


2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Curran ◽  
Aaron Bond ◽  
Gavin Fisher

Accessing the Web from mobile devices is a popular practice. Trends show that the mobile space is becoming the method through which many consumers access content – both through native and web applications. These applications have expanded the browsing experience, but have also complicated the development process. A need exists for a simple, uniform solution which HTML5 is attempting to address. HTML is a mark-up language, now on its fifth edition, used for structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web. Because of the large increase in users of mobile devices, internet access on these devices is widely used. The creation of web sites, web documents, and applications are done with HTML5, as it is compatible with both PC and mobile device browsers. However, with its lengthy development process, it is not yet apparent if HTML5 can incorporate the demands of developers in a changing environment. This paper provides an overview of the use of HTML5 in structuring and presenting content on the World Wide Web and compatibility issues on mobile browsers, key features, tool’s, and the advantages and disadvantages on the mobile web devices as well as the state of the mobile web.


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