Mobile Web Best Practices Roadmap

Mobile Web Best Practices is a site to help people make great mobile web experiences. Since the site launched last month, there’s been a lot of great feedback and great ideas to make this a better resource for anyone taking the plunge into the mobile web. Over the next few months, I really hope to take the site to the next level.

Here’s some features on the site’s horizon:

• Pattern library
• Articles and Tutorials
• Topics section
• Stat Center
• Add and improve best practices
• Glossary
• Bug fixes (aka actually finishing the site’s design)

If you’re interested in helping out with the site, please contact me via Twitter or email.

Mobile Web Pattern Library

There aren’t too many excellent mobile websites in the wild to follow as examples. By creating a pattern library for mobile web sites, we can start to encourage better practices and establish sound design convensions for this unique medium.

The goal is to collect screenshots of great mobile web experiences, similar to Mobile Patterns and Android Patterns, breaking them out by design pattern (i.e. contextual navigation, masthead, overlays, search, etc, etc). It would highlight screenshots from many browsers, including iOS, Android, Opera, Opera Mini, Blackberry and any other browser that can be screenshotable.

Articles and Tutorials

Long-form articles and tutorials allow better opportunities to dive into specific topics and techniques. Getting started guides, site breakdowns (analyzing effective mobile websites) and more could greatly benefit the community. These articles and tutorials would of course link out to related best practices and resources.

Topics Section

The current MWBP categories aren’t as thorough as topics will be. Topics will be collections of best practices, tips, articles and resources from across categories. Topics (which are essentially tags) will look something like this: “Responsive Web Design” “Content Strategy” “Emulators” “Performance”, “Offline”, etc, etc. This should provide a quick and easy way for people to jump into a particular subject in greater depth.

Stat Center

Wouldn’t it be great to answer the question “Why mobile web?” with a single link? This would basically just be a page highlighting the most current statistics about mobile and mobile web usage (i.e. number of mobile phones on planet, number of daily activations, mobile web daily usage, number of social media users on mobile, etc, etc). It would serve as a quick fact sheet to help individuals and businesses make the decision to start caring about a mobile web presence.

Add and Improve Best Practices

I’m excited to work with the community to provide more mobile web best practices as well as rounding out existing tips. The goal of these tips is to be general enough to have a long shelf life and link out to appropriate resources that cover the tip in more detail.

It needs to be easy to suggest a change and/or add a resource. Tips should have more imagery and explanation. It should be easy to ask a question around these tips. There’s also been some requests to be able to view all tips on one page.

Glossary

A glossary section will help define many of the common terms used in the mobile web (including the term “mobile web” itself!).

Bug fixes (aka actually finishing the site’s design)

The Mobile Web Best Practices site is not actually complete. There’s plenty of bugs to fix, plenty of cosmetic/functional features not yet implemented. Expect to see the site evolve to reach more devices. We’ve been talking a lot about mobile-first responsive design and it would be great if the site itself was a great example of what it’s promoting.

Wrapping Up

Here are the hopes for this site:

• Build community and get more passionate mobile web people contributing
• Establish and promote more mobile web best practices using a variety of educational tools
• Generate constructive conversation about real issues regarding mobile web experiences and the future of the web

If you’re interested in helping out in any way, please contact me via Twitter or email and I’ll get right back to you. Thanks!