LITA 2011 Day 1 - Getting Your Mobile Web Presence Off the Ground

This was a great session, presented by Kathryn Frederick from Skidmore College, on developing a mobile website, which they launched just over a year ago.  The presentation is at https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dff8vx6_17hd6nvzcd and the mobile website itself is at http://lib.skidmore.edu/m/.

When developing a mobile version of a site it is important to ask the questions:

• Who are your users and what would they find useful?
• What resources (staff, money, time) are available to you?
• What would you do if you had no limitations?

It's necessary to decide whether you want to make an app or a mobile site.  In the case of Skidmore they decided to make a mobile site.  It's then necessary to decide whether you want to take the existing site and make it work well on mobile, or to design a new mobile site that has a subset of information that's on the regular website.  Finally you have to decide what technologies you will use to make the site work.

When devoloping for mobile it's important to keep in mind the small screen size and the variable connection speed that users will have.  Kathryn also provided information about a lot of different tools to use to test your mobile site and make sure that it works well on different platforms.

Some things to consider including in a mobile website are directions (perhaps GPS based) and clickable phone numbers.  Android Chrome doesn't deal well with RSS feed content which is good to be aware of if you want to integrate that.  It's helpful to use a mobile redirect script and Kathryn included a link to a sample script.  Finally, Kathryn dealt with marketing a mobile site saying thtat QR codes are a handy way to disseminate the URL.