A lighter load for mobile

One of the goals for this redesign is to keep the homepage as light as possible for mobile devices. To accomplish this, we’re doing some server-side detection to determine if the visitor is a mobile device, and if so, we won’t load all the content that we would for desktop/tablet users. Now some might think we’re taking away content or giving mobiles a lesser experience. I prefer to think of it as giving our mobile visitors a springboard to get to the content they want quickly. All of the content we’re not loading is available with a single click/touch on the homepage (see circled items in the screenshot). Compare it to the site on your non-mobile device to see the differences.

To test this functionality, I’d like our readers to visit beta.nd.edu on their mobile phones/devices (no, I’m not counting tablets as mobile devices at this time). If you are not seeing content similar to the screenshot, please fill out this form and let me know. If you have any questions or concerns about how we’re loading content in this way, let us know using the same form.

Browser Testing and Supported Browsers

Work is progressing quickly on the ND.edu redesign. We have not yet started the browser testing portion of our program, but will be shortly. To determine which browsers to support and focus our attention in this process, we look at current browser stats. Below are the browser versions and their current overall traffic percentage for March 2012.

  • IE7 – 10%
  • IE 8 – 19%
  • IE 9 – 13%
  • Safari 5+ – 22%
  • Firefox 10+ – 12%
  • Chrome 17+ – 11%

If you don’t see your browser of choice in this list, now might be a good time to update.