I just activated my blog again and reviewed the vistor statistics and saw a tremendous drop from my last UI. I observed that the trend had around 80% visitors from a desktop while 20% from mobile. Out of that 80%, most were Chrome and a few IE and Firefox. The 20% visitors however only visited my main page and read my main article and left. At max, they visited my tech articles through search. So I started visiting my website from my Samsung S3 which I consider smart enough and voila – I knew what it was that made users not come back – It wasn’t mobile friendly.

Now i’ve been working on a few projects that have demanded me to explore Twitter Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation for quick template responsive UI designs and that was something I set out to use on my website as an experiment. One problem – I had to integrate it with WordPress. As a WordPress developer, there is just so much new with 3.5.1 that getting used to it was not enough that I had to deal with a new UI framework. My choice – Twitter Bootstrap.

My new mobile friendly website is in progress and will be out soon. This made me reconsider everything about a website. After reading this article and seeing the statistics on smart phone usage, it is clear that desktops and laptops have lost the market against smart phones and tabs (yes tabs too) – see http://ansonalex.com/infographics/smartphone-usage-statistics-2012-infographic/

1/5th mobile phones are Smart phones being used by around 1 billion users. Android stands first and Apple second with the OS market. It is astonishing that 89% people spent a lot of their daily time on the phone – reading emails, social networking, internet surfing, shopping, games, chatting, etc. Now if 84% out of this lot is doing internet surfing then its highly likely that your website is going to be visited by a mobile user; that too a smart phone. Are you ready for it? Do you have content ready for that user? Are you showing what needs to be shown?

In my recent consultancy to an apparal shopping site, I used this technique to show and utilize screen space (portrait and landscape modes) for efficient advertising and it has shown results. It is very important that when a user lands on your website, if he is a mobile user, you have very less time to ensure that he stays on your site and further show him interesting content. In that time it is important to show him the right content at the right dimensions and size at the right time.

Can’t wait to release my new blog design – and this time its going to be seamless content integration with Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr. More on that later.