question: Why do some large, multimillion dollar companies have so much trouble making a website that works well on mobile ?
comment: There are a lot of potential aspects to this, but I'm a software developer who used to work for a giant digital agency making those multi-million dollar sites, and it is insane how much overhead and waste there is with companies that throw that kind of money around. One of my last projects before I left, a company literally paid for me and a team of developers full time as contractors through my agency, which means they were paying at least a few hundred an hour each, for almost 3 weeks, for us to sit around watching YouTube videos while they figured out what they wanted us to work on. Then once you do get to work, there are so many stakeholders and managers with conflicting priorities that it can become nearly impossible to make meaningful progress towards a streamlined product. TLDR: Paying multiple millions of dollars for a website can sometimes net you a pretty mediocre, bloated website with a lot of consultant travel and expensed business lunches.
passages: The .mobi sponsored top-level domain was launched specifically for the mobile Internet by a consortium of companies including Google, Microsoft, Nokia, Samsung, and Vodafone. By forcing sites to comply with mobile web standards, .mobi tries to ensure visitors a consistent and optimized experience on their mobile device. However, this domain has been criticized by several big names, including Tim Berners-Lee of the W3C, who claims that it breaks the device independence of the web:
   The mobile web primarily utilizes lightweight pages like this one written in Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML) or Wireless Markup Language (WML) to deliver content to mobile devices. Many new mobile browsers are moving beyond these limits by supporting a wider range of Web formats, including variants of HTML commonly found on the desktop web.
  
  Section::::Top-level domain.
   disputable practice of removing key device information from the HTTP headers of requests from mobile devices. While this practice makes viewing of sites with no mobile version possible on devices with limited or no HTML capabilities, it can also hinder developers' efforts to deliver a user-experience tailored to the capabilities of the requesting mobile device.
  
  Section::::Market Adoption.
   Google announced its intention to make the change in February 2015. "The Economist" found the timing "awkward" because they said "It comes less than a week after the European Union accused the firm..." of anti-competitive behaviors. In addition to their announcement, Google published an article on their Google Developers page to help webmasters with the transition titled "Mobile Friendly Sites". Google claims the transition to mobile-friendly sites was to improve user-experience, stating "the desktop version of a site might be difficult to view and use on a mobile device."
   Mobile web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems. Interoperability issues stem from the platform fragmentation of mobile devices, mobile operating systems, and browsers. Usability problems are centered on the small physical size of the mobile phone form factors (limits on display resolution and user input/operating). Despite these shortcomings, many mobile developers choose to create apps using mobile web. A June 2011 research on mobile development found mobile web the third most used platform, trailing Android and iOS.
   BULLET::::- Navigation – Navigation is a problem for websites not optimized for mobile devices as the content area is large, the screen size is small, and there is no scroll wheel or hover box feature.
  
  BULLET::::- Lack of JavaScript and cookies – most devices do not support client-side scripting and storage of cookies (smartphones excluded), which are now widely used in most web sites to enhance user experience, facilitating the validation of data entered by the page visitor, etc. This also results in web analytics tools being unable to uniquely identify visitors using mobile devices.
   W3C is also developing a validating scheme to assess the readiness of content for the mobile web, through its "mobileOK Scheme", which will help content developers to determine if their content is web-ready quickly. The W3C guidelines and mobile OK approach have not been immune from criticism. This puts the emphasis on adaptation, which is now seen as the key process in achieving the ubiquitous web, when combined with a device description repository.
   mTLD, the registry for .mobi, has released a free testing tool called the MobiReady Report (see mobiForge) to analyze the mobile readiness of website. It does a free page analysis and gives a Mobi Ready score. This report tests the mobile-readiness of the site using industry best practices and standards.
  
  Other standards for the mobile web are being documented and explored for particular applications by interested industry groups, such as the use of the mobile web for the purpose of education and training.
  
  Section::::Development.
   Browsers of basic mobile phones do not understand JavaScript or media queries, so a recommended practice is to create a basic mobile layout and use unobtrusive JavaScript and progressive enhancement for smart phones, rather than rely on graceful degradation to make a complex, image-heavy site work.
  
  Section::::Technology advances leading to necessity.
   HTML, JavaScript and CSS3 seamlessly integrate backend systems with browsers and user interfaces. This creates an easy-to-use experience for all users on any device. Although some designs are scaled down, which can limit functionality, responsive and adaptive web design is easily accessible for any customer. And functionality is all about priority. If a scaled down site still performs the necessary functions, users will still find the advantages of increased turnarounds and time saving.
   In October 2012, Tweakers launched a new design, designed by Femme Taken, the founder. However, the new design met with criticism from their community. A couple of days later, Tweakers launched a new feature which enabled the community to change the appearance of the website.
  
  The current responsive design was introduced on 6 January 2014. The Android and iOS apps were removed from their respective stores on 7 October 2014.
  
  In February 2014 Tweakers significantly improved the price comparison tool for sim only contracts.
   In an article in "Communications of the ACM" in April 2013, Web technologist Nicholas C. Zakas noted that mobile phones in use in 2013 were more powerful than Apollo 11's Apollo Guidance Computer used in the July 1969 lunar landing. However, in spite of their power, in 2013, mobile devices still suffer from web performance with slow connections similar to the 1996 stage of web development. Mobile devices with slower download request/response times, the latency of over-the-air data transmission, with "high-latency connections, slower CPUs, and less memory" force developers to rethink web applications created for desktops with "wired connections, fast CPUs, and almost endless memory."
   The On-device portal is also not without complications, supporting wide handset lists is a lot harder to manage than mobile web content, and updating major components is not just a case of re-publishing, but of redistributing applications. At the same time, while it is generally easy to test web content on a handful of browsers, portals need to be tested on nearly every handset which will be expected to use the on-device portal.
  
  Section::::Mobile User Experience for On-Device Portals.
   Websites designed so that they may be accessed from these browsers are referred to as "wireless portals" or collectively as the Mobile Web. They may automatically create "mobile" version of each page, for example the Wikipedia website.
  
  Section::::Underlying technology.
   On-Device Portals target four main user categories: 
  
  BULLET::::- Consumers, who demand an improved interface for their mobile experience
  
  BULLET::::- Operators, who want to improve ARPU with richer media content
  
  BULLET::::- Content and media providers who want to monetize their offerings in the mobile world
  
  BULLET::::- Handset manufacturers, who want technology frameworks to help customize handsets for their customers
  
  BULLET::::- Consumers who want to extend their web based social networking experience onto the mobile device (Facebook, BeBo, MySpace etc.) or share / back-up content from their mobile device to the web (Nokia Ovi, Flikr mobile etc.)
   BULLET::::- Types of pages accessible – many sites that can be accessed on a desktop cannot on a mobile device. Many devices cannot access pages with a secured connection, Flash or other similar software, PDFs, or video sites, although as of 2011, this has been changing.
  
  BULLET::::- Speed – on most mobile devices, the speed of service is slow, sometimes slower than dial-up Internet access.
  
  BULLET::::- Broken pages – on many devices, a single page as viewed on a desktop is broken into segments, each treated as a separate page. This further slows navigation.
   BULLET::::- Manage access rights
  
  BULLET::::- Start mobile site from the web or Settings
  
  BULLET::::- Share mobile site content via RSS feeds
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- Python for S60
  
  BULLET::::- Apache Tomcat, alternative open source web server and servlet container
  
  BULLET::::- ApacheBench, a program for measuring the performance of HTTP web servers
  
  Section::::External links.
  
  BULLET::::- Official links
  
  BULLET::::- Nokia Research - Mobile Web Server
  
  BULLET::::- Nokia Wiki - Mobile Web Server
  
  BULLET::::- Nokia Forum - Mobile Web Server Documentation
  
  BULLET::::- SourceForge - Mobile Web Server
  
  BULLET::::- All About Symbian - Previewing Nokia's Mobile Web Server
   In the very early days of smartphones, like the BlackBerrys of the mid- to late 2000s, screen dimensions were highly varied, and in addition, mobile browsers on these devices lacked the advanced functionality and plugins used to create rich environments in desktop browsers. Additionally, data was a high-priced commodity and very slow so it was necessary to design special "stripped-down" mobile pages, with fewer images (or lower quality ones) and sharp text-wrapping for easy readability, ads needed to be scaled considerably as well. HTML at the time only allowed for fixed coordinates and no scaling (which is the reason websites were almost always bound to the top left, or top right in certain regions—responsive web design allowed for centering and relative coordinates, which led to the change to centered content pages). So in order to achieve pages which would load on mobile, developers had to design completely new pages for mobile viewing, more often than not needing to start from scratch; since these browsers were often difficult to navigate, creating large, easily seen links was also necessary. The next major change to adaptive standard web design came in more recent years, particularly with the rise of the iPhone and two years later widespread 3G availability dramatically increasing connection speeds and available bandwidth, a two design dynamic system became the most utilized, a mobile layout (usually with the subdomain prefix ""m"") optimized for iPhone and a desktop layout. The mobile versions were still usually "scaled-down" with lower quality images and sometimes content such as videos removed to decrease loading time. This was also the first time web developers had to design with a touch screen in mind, using larger clickable links and buttons to facilitate the use of fingers as pointers. As Google's Android OS rose to popularity and introduced more variation in the market share of smartphones, along with the widespread implementation of 4G LTE's ultra fast mobile broadband, it was no longer necessary to downgrade mobile media quality or trim content to deal with slow connection speeds, and, with so much variation in devices, the multi-page paradigm of Standard Dynamic web design widely lost favor with developers. While some still use the concept to completely separate touch-screen content design from desktop design, responsive web design has nearly all the tools necessary to perform nearly any manipulation in response to a large variety of factors, allowing for one page to serve all purposes. When integrating with material design or device specific layout and color schemes, some developers find it simpler to create three page templates (Android, iPhone/iOS, desktop) changing the icons and colors between each, while using media queries to determine layout. The practice results in much simpler page design and code, but updating requires editing all 3 templates. There are variations on this concept that blur the lines between AWD and RWD, like Django's "views."
   Some vendors have started to incorporate the kind of functionality needed to support mobile Web 2.0 and as the market matures, idle screen access, mobile widget platforms and the ability to support a broad range of operator business models (subscription, transaction and advertising driven) will become imperative for all ODP solutions.
  
  Section::::See also.
  
  BULLET::::- 3G
  
  BULLET::::- Average Revenue Per User
  
  BULLET::::- Advanced Mobile Phone System
  
  BULLET::::- GSM
  
  BULLET::::- Handheld Device Markup Language
  
  BULLET::::- High-Speed Downlink Packet Access
  
  BULLET::::- High-Speed Uplink Packet Access
  
  BULLET::::- Java programming language
  
  BULLET::::- Location-based service
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile advertising
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile device
  
  BULLET::::- Mobile development
   The mobile browser on a smartphone, a handheld computer integrated with a mobile phone, provided a means to read simple tables of data. The small screen space, immature mobile browsers, and slow data transmission could not provide a satisfactory BI experience.
   The majority of modern smartphones are able to browse websites, some with browsing experiences similar to those of desktop computers. The W3C Mobile Web Initiative identifies best practices to help websites support mobile phone browsing. Many companies use these guidelines and mobile-specific code like Wireless Markup Language or HTML5 to optimize websites for viewing on mobile devices.
  
  Section::::Drawbacks of applying traditional web analytics.
   A recent requirement beginning February 1, 2018 from Google requires the canonical page content should match the content on accelerated mobile pages. In creating a great user experience and to avoid user interface traps it's important to display the same content on Accelerated Mobile Pages as there are with the standard canonical pages.
  
  Section::::Limitations.
   Advances in the capabilities of small, mobile devices such as mobile phones (cell phones) and Personal Digital Assistants have led to an explosion in the number of types of device that can now access the Web. Some commentators refer to the Web that can be accessed from mobile devices as the Mobile Web.
  
  The sheer number and variety of Web-enabled devices poses significant challenges for authors of Web sites who want to support access from mobile devices. The W3C Device Independence Working Group described many of the issues in its report Authoring Challenges for Device Independence.
   Though Internet access "on the go" provides advantages to many, such as the ability to communicate by email with others and obtain information anywhere, the web, accessed from mobile devices, has many limits, which may vary, depending on the device. However, newer smartphones overcome some of these restrictions. Some problems which may be encountered include:
  
  BULLET::::- Small screen size – this makes it difficult or impossible to see text and graphics dependent on the standard size of a desktop computer screen.
   The Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) was set up by the W3C to develop the best practices and technologies relevant to the mobile web. The goal of the initiative is to make browsing the web from mobile devices more reliable and accessible. The main aim is to evolve standards of data formats from Internet providers that are tailored to the specifications of particular mobile devices. The W3C has published guidelines for mobile content, and is addressing the problem of device diversity by establishing a technology to support a repository of device descriptions.
  
raw_presuppositions: Large, multimillion dollar companies can't afford to make a website that works well on mobile.
raw_corrections: Large, multimillion dollar companies sometimes have too much bureaucracy and conflicting priorities to make a website that works well on mobile.