The world is internet connected and, with the surge in use of smartphones and tablets, mobile websites are becoming an increasingly important part of people's lives. You can now be pretty certain that your site will be consumed by some type of mobile device so you need to be optimised for mobile. Interestingly, 70% of companies have yet to optimise their websites for mobile. It's a huge missed opportunity.
Kentico CMS for Mobile
Motive's mobile optimised site was built using Kentico CMS (content management system) which helps simplify design, implementation and deployment.
Mobile users accessing the website are redirected to mobile optimised web pages by Kentico’s mobile device redirection web part. This web part reads the incoming HTTP request and checks the User Agent string submitted by the client browser.
There are important differences with mobile applications, the most obvious being smaller screen size, reduced browser capabilities and limited connectivity. Users are often in a number of different environmental situations such as travelling, shopping, standing in a queue, browsing in varying levels of light – any issues caused by these situations need to be reduced as much as possible.
The team at Motive are users of a number of mobile devices including, iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. Testing of the mobile site was carried out on these devices (rather than emulators), to ensure an awesome user experience across multiple platforms. For iPad, the desktop website functions beautifully and fits perfectly on the screen, so there was no need to redirect to the mobile site. iPad users don’t want to be forced to view a site designed for a device with only a quarter of the screen size! We chose to optimise our desktop site for iPad when we originally launched the new site in February.
The management of content for both of Motive's sites is easily managed through one CMS. Care was taken when designing the mobile site, to ensure images and copy from the desktop site can work on mobile with minimum of transformation or re-writing. Images are automatically resized to optimal dimensions for both desktop and mobile; we made sure the 16:9 image aspect used throughout the desktop site slots perfectly in to the mobile design. Administrators' time isn't affected and there is complete synergy between the sites.
Tags: mobile, Kentico