I was using my wife’s Kindle the other day and thought: “Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to make our online course texts function this way?”  A few hours of Google searching for a viable solution and some code later and I present to you my results…

Over at NTEN, Nam-ho Park describes four approaches to mobile sites (click through for descriptions of each):

• Update your existing platform to mobile
• Create a mobile website
• Employ responsive design
• Create a native mobile app

What if you found out that one-quarter of your subscribers were reading your emails on their mobile phones? There’s a good chance they already are. (And if they’re not, they will be soon!)

Click through above for some tips on making email mobile-friendly.

As understood from Marcotte’s seminal article and book, Responsive Web Design is a flexible, adaptive approach to the display of web content, achieved via technologies that rearrange, resize, add or subtract content. Marcotte’s Responsive Design serves a more legible, usable web page to an array of devices with varying screen resolutions and download speeds.

The popularity of Marcotte’s responsive web design will likely result in better content consumption experiences for a lot of websites, for a lot of people. However, by focusing our conversation on the optimization of visual presentation, we’ve placed just one of what I hope will be the three pillars of responsive web design: content, presentation and interface. By broadening the definition, we will allow responsive web design to better support the way people experience the web today and will experience it tomorrow.

In this essay, we explore ways in which the first pillar, content, might become responsive. But before we begin, let’s first examine the role physical devices can play in making these experiences possible, especially the mobile devices which initially inspired the responsive web design movement…

We’ve known for quite a while that mobile is on the rise, but several recent studies, including one presented at last week’s Web 2.0 Summit, are revealing some pretty impressive stats to back this up. Among the findings:

• Mobile internet has penetrated nearly 60% of the US market.
• Around 40% of users access social media from their phones.
• Up to 19% of email messages are now read on mobile, Internet-enabled devices like smartphones or tablets.
• Mobile search has grown fourfold in the last few years.
• E-commerce, especially mobile commerce, is on the rise.

This is a simple jQuery plugin to convert menus into a select element for mobile devices and low browser widths.

Usage:

$(document).ready(function(){
	$('ul#id').mobileMenu({
	  switchWidth: 768,                   //width (in px to switch at)
	  topOptionText: 'Select a page',     //first option text
	  indentString: '   '  //string for indenting nested items
	});
});

(Source: twitter.com)

The study finds an explosive 81% growth in mobile email viewership. While mobile email viewership is expected to continue to increase, webmail and desktop viewership isn’t going away. People are consuming email anywhere and everywhere they are – at home, in the office and on the road. The leading platform for viewing email is webmail with 48% of the total. Desktop use is a little more than 36% of views with mobile access coming in around 16%. When it comes to desktop access, Outlook (with all versions of that platform combined) owns 63% of the views. The 81% growth in the accessing of email via a mobile device comes at the expense of webmail access, with desktop use remaining steady.
…
What is critical for marketers to know is that with the introduction of the tablet, the definition of mobile changed permanently. As tablet use becomes more common, new kinds of email experiences in new places and times are now available to consumers. Marketers need to adapt to the ways consumers are viewing content as an important part of staying ahead of the curve.