So Many Mobile Devices: Web Developers Struggle to Keep Up

With so many mobile devices available for website visitors, many developers are struggling to keep their sites up to date. Should they develop one site that fits all, or versions of the site for each mobile device’s browser?

The industry is starting to respond to that quandary, though a web standard for mobile devices has yet to be created. Suresh Gunasagaran, director of web design firm Interactive@OOm, believes web developers will eventually optimize their sites for most devices, stating “The way content is read and displayed would be slightly different if I were using a Samsung phone, compared to an Apple iPhone. It is only a matter of time before full-fledged Web sites are completely optimized for most types of phones.”

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) understands the problem, but their answer doesn’t really help ease developer’s minds. Dominique Hazaël-Massieux,lead for W3C Mobile Web Initiative, put it bluntly. “It depends. On one end, there are Web sites where mobile visitors are not expected to be hugely important so therefore, having a single Web site is probably the most cost effective.”