The Globe and Mail's mobile website received a tremendous amount of traffic in 2010 and if the trend continues (and we know it will) 2011 promises to bring even more! To that end, we've spent the last few months completely re-engineering the foundation of the site: we've streamlined how editors publish content and in doing so have made the mobile website more robust with even more news and features; we've cleaned up the navigation and have made buttons and links bigger and more "finger-friendly" for touch enabled devices; and we've made sure that pages load quickly so you don't have to wait.
In developing our new mobile website structure we took a look at the top 20 devices that you are using to access the site and built around them. We discovered that there are essentially three types of devices that we need to accommodate:
Fallback devices
These are models that have a limited web browser and little to no JavaScript and CSS support (the things that help make a website interactive and attractive). One example of such a device is the BlackBerry 7100. If you're browsing our site using a fallback device, you can expect a text-only experience to make pages load as quickly as possible. There are some things that we might not be able to get to work on a fall back device in the future, but we will make sure it is as good as it can be. Plus, phones are getting better all the time and we can see a lot of users already migrating to higher-end devices.Smartphone devices
If you are using a BlackBerry Bold or a relatively new BlackBerry device like the latest Curve to access the Globe's mobile site, then you fall into the second of our device buckets. These are devices that offer a capable web browsing experience and have support for JavaScript and CSS. Smartphone users will, in most cases, experience the mobile website in the same manner as our last group of devices (the biggest difference in most cases is the lack of touch support).High-end devices
These represent best-in-class mobile devices. They offer a highly capable modern web browser with great support for JavaScript and CSS styling. The majority of these devices are touch-enabled: examples being the BlackBerry Torch, Samsung Galaxy S and other Android devices, the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Our smartphone and high-end users can expect to see new navigation on the mobile website:
Clicking or touching the "Sections" button reveals the navigation menu while performing the same action again hides it.
Touching or clicking any of the section names will take you to that section. We like that the new navigation is straightforward and takes up less screen real estate and we hope you do too ;) For sections like the homepage that aim to deliver as much content as possible, you can flip between news panes via the addition of the new tab bar.
We've improved the layout of our section pages by making typographical adjustments, adding easy-to-read labels where applicable and adding larger buttons to get you on your way:
The last set of changes we've made improve the article page view. We've created bigger sharing and text-size buttons and added inline related content:
In the coming weeks we'll be looking at adding a slew of new features and functionality. Some items from the to-do list include:
- Add more support for certain content that currently can only be seen on the full globeandmail.com website
- Enable high-resolution images for devices like the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S on section pages, article pages and photo galleries
- Build better security look-up tools and more in-depth quote pages for stocks, mutual funds and ETFs, commodities and indexes
- Bring a version of the new watchlist over to create a more mobile-friendly way to keep an eye on the stocks you care about
One last thing to note: We like to type as little as possible on our mobile devices (as you do) so you can now access The Globe's mobile website via our URL shortening service. Just type http://m.tgam.ca into your browser's address bar. We hope you like the changes we've made and look forward to hearing your comments and questions. Happy New Year!
Update:
Some of you may have noticed that the mobile site hasn't been very stable over the last week and that we reverted back to the previous version on Wednesday afternoon. After a lot of code review and server debugging, we can confidently say that the cause of the problem has been identified and addressed and that everything is now a-ok! Thanks for sticking with us during the ups and downs ;)
