It’s been four months since I attended the Breaking Development Conference in Nashville and I still think about the experience on a daily basis. I had been playing with mobile design and webpages for a number of years but it was always an afterthought, a redirect to another page or sub-domain. It was never about developing for the range of devices and platforms. I also went through a phase of developing Flash-based content for some of the first Flash-enabled phones. But it was always a hard sell to clients, who had a hard time seeing the value of a mobile content strategy.

Modular has been a mantra of mine for several years. I focused on making content reusable and agnostic. The trick is convincing people to make their content strategy device-agnostic.

Properly structured content is portable to future platforms. —Stephen Hay

Since returning from BDConf, I have been evangelizing about mobile design and content strategy to anyone who would listen and thinking about how to integrate web development and design for mobile devices into the curriculum at Sheridan. Trying to get everyone moving toward a future-friendly web has been an uphill battle at times. I’ve pulled server logs and used Google analytics to show which web pages and content is being accessed by mobile devices. People will pull up a website on their phone and announce, “See, the webpage shows up!”  The problem is not the display of the site content (as a miniaturized version of the site on a smartphone) , it is the ability to access the content. Each page requires the user to pinch and zoom or move around the page to find the links or use the search bar. Sometimes simply trying to read the page content is difficult due to its size.

A future-friendly web is about giving users the same experience and content regardless of device or platform. Mobile First thinking is catching hold. It is changing the way businesses and organizations are thinking about their content strategies. Developer tool kits and frameworks are making the design and development easier. Responsive design, adaptive design and progressive enhancement provide the means to build beyond the desktop.

If you have the time and the means, attending Breaking Development is a must for anyone designing or developing for mobile (and the web).