Development

The ability to detect mobile devices is an important part of website and web application design. Over the last year, requests to sites from mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones have risen to almost 20% of total web traffic. As well as this, dozens of new devices with varying screen sizes, input methods and capabilities are released onto the market all the time. Keeping up with this diversity is a nessecery but difficult task for any organisation maintaining a presence on the web. A good solution is to use a Device Description Repository to detect mobile devices through the browser header and its User Agent. 51Degrees.mobi's professionally maintained device data makes this process easy to implement and stays current through automatic updates.

IIS has had a long running problem where Dynamic Compression overwrites the Vary Header, making effective caching almost impossible. This can now be fixed using the Vary Header modules from 51Degrees.

51Degrees Mobile Detector for Python provides information about the device, operating system and browser accessing your website. I have created a easy to follow example to get you going using the 51Degrees.mobi Python solution with an example Django website.

Understanding what devices are browsing your website and their capabilities is key to optimising your website for mobile. I have put together some small code examples showing how you can gain this sort of knowledge using 51Degrees Device Detection, allowing you to fully optimise your mobile users web experience.

51Degrees Mobile Theme Switcher for Drupal allows you to take existing content and offer it to mobile users with an optimised theme. You can quickly, easily and cost-effectively optimise your Drupal website for mobile performance by following this blog.

Google have recently announced they will soon change the algorithms they use to determine a websites mobile page rank. These changes will penalise webmasters who have not properly considered the increasing legions of mobile users.

Google's recommendations consist of three officially supported configurations

1. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
2. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.
3. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device.

All 3 configurations are equally valid. This blog post summarises the important considerations to optimise for end users and search engines.

Developing websites to accommodate for mobile devices has now become standard practice. However, what happens when developers need to determine between different mobile devices (tablets, smartphones, e-readers, games consoles etc)?

IsEmailBrowser is a new beta property that has been added to the 51Degrees.mobi property library. IsEmailBrowser can be used to indicate whether a HTTP request was sent from an email client or from a regular browser.

51Degrees.mobi Detector for PHP ensures that the Premium Data file is kept up to date by offering an update feature that will download and apply any new data released by 51Degrees.mobi. Unfortunately, a vanilla PHP install will only respond to web requests, so cannot be made to update by itself regularly.

This guide outlines how to create a Cron job to automatically update your Premium Data file in a PHP environment.

Review the slides from my recent web seminar with Kentico on the Future Web Design – Mobiles, Tablets, TVs and Glasses.