Writing Mobile Sites - Lessons learned and top tips for web developers

Adam Stephensen, Solution Architect at SSW, caught up with Dino Esposito, Technical Evangelist at JetBrains, to discuss the lessons learnt building mobile apps and sites. Many of today’s users are on the web via mobile devices, yet too many web sites are neither optimized nor adapted to render on multiple devices. Too many developers think a little CSS magic will do the trick. Responsive Web Design (RWD) delivers multi-device views without extra costs, but what if you have workflows to implement or different use-cases? This video session with Dino looks at a few real examples where RWD is not enough and server-side detection is necessary.

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Video questions

00:45 When building mobile applications for the enterprise, what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned?
02:45 Is it true that you don’t believe that responsive web design answers most of the requirements when building sites targeted at mobile devices?
04:40 MVC 4 added great functionality for conditionally rendering different views for the same action method (Display Modes). Do you find this is one of the key features you utilise for mobile targeting?
08:35 How does you see CSS Media Queries, the ViewPort meta tag and ASP.Net MVC Display modes working in together?
12:30 It seems that RWD and server side device detection are mutually exclusive, is that really so?
15:05 ASP.Net 1.0 introduced the browser capabilities database, but that feature really hasn’t coped with the explosion of mobile browsers available. What are your recommendations around device detection because this is obviously a dependency in order to serve up the correct mobile view ?
19:25 How do you handle the situation where a different workflow is required for different devices. e.g. a workflow for a mobile checkout might be 10 steps where a desktop checkout may only be require 3 steps with more information on each screen?
23:35 I think there is a tendency amongst so called ‘back end’ web developers to avoid some of the more user facing UI topics like RWD. Is RWD something that you think should be the focus of designers and html guys, or is it something the C# crowd should be spending more time on?
26:00–26:50 What are the most common mistakes that you see with respect to mobile targeting?
26:50 Where should I go for more resources to find out the complete story on mobile targeting?

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About the speakers

Mr RWD

Dino Esposito is a consultant and the author of several .NET books published by Microsoft Press. Based in Italy, Dino is a frequent speaker at industry events worldwide.

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