It seems like everybody has a smart phone these days. This means that more and more people are turning to these mobile devices to do things that they would normally do on their desktop or laptop, like checking and sending email and viewing web content. That’s why it’s almost a must now to pay more attention to how your website looks on mobile devices. Yes, this does just add one more thing to the list of ways that web designers have to test their work, but thankfully their are tools out there to make our lives a little bit easier. So here are 7 useful tools for mobile website testing.
iBBDemo2
iBBDemo2 is an Adobe Air application that does a good job of emulating the iPhone and iPad web browsing experience. It can be a useful tool for testing Web apps targeting the iOS family of mobile devices. It can also be useful for doing presentations to demo iOS Web apps if you don’t have access to a Mac.
mobiReady
The mobiReady testing tool evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards. The free report provides both a score (from 1 to 5) and in-depth analysis of pages to determine how well your site performs on a mobile device.
Opera Mini Simulator
Opera Mini Simulator, as it’s name suggests, is a live simulator of the Opera Mini browser. It works just as it would on mobile devices.
iPadPeek
Gomez Mobile Website Readiness Test
Gomez’s free Mobile Readiness Test evaluates how well your site performs on a mobile phone. Instantly get a score from 1 to 5 based on an in-depth analysis of 30 proven mobile Web development best practices, ranging from standards compliant code and style sheet use to caching techniques.
W3C mobileOK Checker
The W3C mobileOK Checker performs various tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The tests are defined in the mobileOK Basic Tests 1.0 specification. A Web Page is mobileOK when it passes all the tests.
iPhoney
iPhoney is not an iPhone simulator but instead is designed for web developers who want to create 320 by 480 (or 480 by 320) websites for use with iPhone. It gives you a canvas on which to test the visual quality of your designs.
nice tip thanks for sharing.
Quite useful!
I was looking for something like this.
Bookmarked, thanks for share.
Opera Mini Simulator’s link leads to mobile validator site.
Thanks for spotting that. Fixed.
there is something wrong with the Opera Mini Simulator link
This will help me out a great deal because I don’t actually own an iPad but I would like to do some marketing towards iPad users. I was also surprised my website was given 0% on the mobile web validation site. looks like I have some work to do.
ProtoFluid v2 – Rapid prototyping of adaptive CSS and responsive web design.
https://protofluid.com
– Multiple draggable device windows
– switch orientations
– loads of devices to choose from
– perfect for css3 media query tweaking
Thanks for the round-up, I had no idea W3C offered a tool for mobile website validation.
Thank you very much.
But if you know all this, why don’t big companies know this. Why don’t they produce proper sites for the mobile market?
I bookmarked it because to me, this article seems to me to be the best for practical usage.
Very helpful article thanks… I too was unaware of the W3C mobile site validation.
W3C tools doesn’t seem to be able to see the mobile version of our site? It defaults to another stylesheet based upon some javascript we set up.
Great tools very useful. Thank You
There is one important type of test missing from this list. It’s a test of the usability of the mobile website. It’s not so much to do with what goes on behind the screen, but the way the user interacts with it. Mr. Tappy is a toolkit for filming mobile device user experience, from the user’s point of view.
Check him out here:
http://www.mrtappy.com
Happy tapping!
Thank you for the list for the tools to test mobile websites. I likes the site to validate mobile websites too for W3C validator.