Going mobile, one small step at a time

Earlier in the year I wrote a post on Mobile browser trends into 2010, where I looked at how traffic from mobile devices had be steadily rising from around a thousand visits per month in April 2009, to seven thousand visits per month in April 2010.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to these figures lately, but I was quite shocked to see that mobile traffic had rocketed up to twenty thousand visits per month. Perhaps a bigger shock was that this increase had been much less gradual than over the previous year. Growth had remained steady until September this year, but then the start of the new academic year saw a doubling of visits - hello to our new intake of smartphone-carrying students.

Smartphone traffic to york.ac.uk, 24 December 2009 to 24 December 2010. The huge leap is the start of the new academic year

So will 2011 be the year that we start to make some headway into the mobile world? Hopefully we can make some time alongside the other projects that we've committed to for next year.

Making our blog mobile-friendly

How the blog now appears on an iPhone

My actual reason for writing this post, before I got distracted by looking at graphs, was to say that this blog now has a mobile enabled template, so should be much easier to read on a smaller screen.

(Aside - if you're a blogger user, this is really simple to enable for your own blog. See New mobile templates for reading on the go - Blogger in draft.)

While we may not have a mobile version of the university website for the twenty thousand people who look at it each month on their mobile, the small band of followers of this blog can now enjoy a better mobile reading experience.

Merry Christmas everybody!