Google

Large bag of crisps at my side and headset on (‘HMD’ if you must), I nestle into the comfiest armchair in the house.  The soft padding of the headgear feels secure and reassuringly weighty as it encloses my skull, and with all peripheral vision also blocked off, I feel I have just announced “Do Not Disturb” to the rest of the household. 

This week we would like to share with you the newest feature addition to our device detection, the brand new property "Device Certifications". This property will be available exclusively to our Enterprise edition and will enable the detection of several device certifications, the first of which will be Google Daydream.

On the 24th February Google launched AMP. Announced last October, AMP is an open source platform that aims to improve user experience of the mobile Web by reducing the possible complexity of Web pages.

Analytics techniques haven't kept pace with the rapidly evolving techniques of Responsive Web Design (RWD) and server side adaptive design. Google Analytics will provide information about the device model (i.e. iPhone or Galaxy S4) or whether the device is classified as a mobile, tablet or desktop, but this isn't often sufficient to make informed design decisions to improve a web page or site. Consider click through rate (CTR) on advertising. How do you know if adverts on a 3 to 4 inch diagonal screen performs better or worse than a 5 to 6 inch diagonal screen? You don't without some enhancements.

After countless leaks, rumours & speculation and even a few teases from Google, the newest iteration of Google's mobile operating system, codenamed KitKat, has finally been unveiled.

You have just finished creating your sparkling new mobile business app and are eager to promote it to as many people as possible. You already have a good mobile web audience; why not tell them about your app with an interstitial before they hit your website? Well you see, not only do your mobile web users hate this method of advertising, Google have also taken a stand.

Last week Google announced their plans to push websites into offering great mobile web experiences. With this announcement came some controversy over Google's preferred method of mobilisation. This blog explains the reality of Google's "endorsement".

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.

In the last few months I've had several questions from 51Degrees.mobi Framework users asking how to implement google adverts on their web sites. Google have a very simple piece of javascript that can be used with high end phones. However this won't work on all phones, and as those familiar with 51Degrees.mobi will know we don't like to exclude people because they don't have the high end phones. The ASP provided for all phones won't work in ASP.NET and requires some tweaking to get working. This blog explains how to use Google AdSense and an ASP.NET user control to get Google Ads on a web page in minutes.