A survey by UK-based nucleus has indicated that web browsing on mobile devices has grown 72 percent between August 2011 and January 2012 - to an average 17.4 percent of all traffic. The company’s survey of 10 travel websites with 2.75m users in January 2012 suggests that Apple users dominate mobile web browsing.

The company highlighted that brands must now optimise their websites for tablets, with finger-friendly navigation and controls enabling swipes, tilts, zooms and pinches and replacing Flash with HTML 5. In most cases, making websites smartphone-friendly will require a fundamental re-think of both website content and structure.

Providing mobile-friendly web browsing brand experiences is key, especially in the travel and ecommerce sectors, where online conversion is vital for business.

The company mentioned that brand owners must, at the very least, optimise their websites for tablets:

- Touch optimise (swipe, pinch, tilt, zoom)
- No Flash, build in HTML 5
- Higher definition images
- Re-cropped imagery to suit tilting formats and smaller screens

Also, it suggested that smartphone-friendly websites will also be a requirement for many brands, whether mobile-optimised or stand-alone mobile sites with stripped-down content and functionality and smartphone-friendly navigation.

Findings

The survey, titled The beginning of the end of the PC era?, highlighted:

According to nucleus, Apple’s iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod) dominance is even more apparent, with iPad’s and iPhone’s accounting for over 85 percent of mobile browsing devices in the survey – and even higher on top-end luxury brand websites.  

Despite all the recent hype about Android smartphone and tablet shipments, the survey shows only a fraction of those shipped are being used to browse websites. Android’s overall share of web browsing has actually dropped from 9.6 percent to 8.2 percent since August. The results show that Android browsing is doing better on mass market travel websites, indicating more demographic strength in price-sensitive markets, but even on these websites iOS continues to forge ahead.