Mobile First

I have now moved my personal server(s) over to rackspace utilizing a cloud server for hosting my sites. Given this change of hosting I can spin-up new sites and servers with ease. I've been a subscriber to rackspace for a while now and have deployed a number of clients onto this excellent service. As I move my sites over I have also decided it is time to revisit the whole structure, coding and target device(s). Therefore, I've decided to take a mobile first approach. What I mean by this is the website content is made available for mobile devices at the same time as it is made available for desktop web browsers. The information architecture and user experience design consider the mobile device before the website. Where the website becomes more of the users "administrative console" to follow up upon what they do first on their mobile device. More on this in subsequent posts...

I can say with confidence that most of the sites I build from now on will use a mobile first approach. This due to the adoption of mobile devices has started to outpace the adoption of desktops and laptops. Thinking about how a solution should be deployed to mobile first is a shift in thinking from a usability and architecture perspective. And how the browser-based "administrator console" works with the mobile experience creates the complete solution. Again, more on this in subsequent posts...

So as I build my new rackspace solutions with a mobile first approach feel free to follow along. I'll be building the sites step-by-step with companion learning resources and with a more non-technical bent. Even though the implementation will be quite technical and follow a MVC Three-Tier approach. If you want some early insight into the technologies I'll be using, this is what I am currently thinking;

• Presentation Tier (MVC) - HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and some PhP
• Business Tier - PhP (with object orientation and some RESTful approaches where appropriate)
• Data Tier - PhP, MySQL (with some separation of reads from writes)