Welcome to Chez Cliff!

In this rebirth of our product line, one aspect I took a hard look at was our mobile site.

Back in the day, I spoke about a wordpress plugin that would detect and convert your blog into something compatible with mobile devices.  The issue is this: my regular site is slow enough but the mobile site is even slower.

BuyThatDuplex.com takes between 5 and 10 seconds to download on a computer.  The mobile version takes between 40 seconds and 1 minute 10 seconds to download.

Far far far too long.

In Apple’s documentation, they discuss how the wireless usage for the internet is a significant drain on the battery.  If the user has a WiFi connection at home, great.  If not, they are using their regular cell-phone channels to download data.  In either case, the battery is getting hit up for a minute each time the user clicks a button to view my site.  If a user visits 3 or 4 pages on your site, that’s around 5 minutes of hard wireless usage that eats away at the battery life.

Since I’m on this kick about the “user experience”, we started asking hard questions about how we could enhance this for our users.

1. Scrap Wordpress.  With a bare minimum compliment of plugins, the site takes too long to download.  Even on a computer.
2. Design pages that are formatted for mobile devices but are linked directly to the main site.
3. Fast, fast, fast, and easy navigation.  Images to a minimum.

My goal with this new website:  the real version downloads in under 5 seconds on a landline.  The mobile version in under 10 seconds.

Below is a sampling of mobile websites so those of you without smartphones can see what I’m talking about.  I timed each site and the maximum download time was around 10 seconds.