What Are The Implications Of The Mobile Web For Online Marketers?

There is a lot of discussion going on at the moment about the mobile web and people using smart phones to access the web more and more.

The real question for business owners is How Do You Optimise Your Website For The Mobile Web?

What is different about having a website for people accessing it through a desktop and accessing it through a smart phone?

What about the .mobi domain extension, is it worth getting one?

Do the search engines give it more relevance for people searching using their smart phone?

Do you have to have one website for desktop access (normal access) and one website for mobile access?

Are companies losing out by not addressing the mobile market?

To find answers to these questions you need to:

• Understand the drivers for mobile internet growth
• Be aware of the limitations of the mobile web
• Take a view on the latest mobile web predictions for 2010 and beyond.

What Is The Mobile Internet?

According to wikipedia, “Mobile Web” refers to internet access from a mobile device, such as a smartphone or a laptop.

Why The Mobile Web?

Mobile Web access has many advantages over fixed line access.

With mobile you don’t have to remember to do something on the Web when you get back to your home or office. You can do it immediately wherever you are and when you find a need to do so.

The potential exists to reach places previously impossible for internet access – such as sporting events, mountain  rescue teams or disaster areas.

Clearly with a mobile device such as a mobile handset, a smartphone, an Ipad or a Kindle eReader, the web can reach a much larger audience.

The ability to access a wider audience is likely to be very significant in developing countries.

For example web-enabled mobile devices will probably provide easier access to the internet just as mobile telephones have bypassed the use of fixed line networks in providing telephone services.

What Are The Limitations?

While becoming increasingly popular, mobile Web access today still suffers from interoperability and usability problems.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a Web Initiative that addresses these issues through a concerted effort of key players in the mobile production chain, including authoring tool vendors, content providers, handset manufacturers, browser vendors and mobile operators.

What Do Web Surfers Think?

About.com recently reported that Keynote Competitive Research, measured the performance of 10 retail mobile Web sites during the busy holiday weeks of Nov. 18, 2009 to Jan. 4, 2010.

The 10 sites were Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Foot Locker, Musician’s Friend, Sears, Target and Wal-Mart.

The main problems encountered included slow download speeds, high error rates and unacceptable availability.

From studying a number of other research finding it appears that the most serious problems with mobile include:

• Poor performance and slow download speed.
• This leads to a much higher cost for accessing normal pages from a mobile device.
• Small screen size hinders viewing normal websites
• Mobile devices generally cannot view flash, pdf’s, videos or password controlled access pages
• From a mobile device normal web pages are broken up into multiple segments
• Many pages from a normal website are compressed into a format that makes them difficult to view from a mobile device
• Navigation on mobiles is limited to just up or down scrolling

As you can see, a combination of slow performance and a poor user experience makes it unrealistic to expect any sort of decent results from mobile web for pages not specifically designed for mobile.

Does The Mobile Web Need A Special Top Level Domain .Mobi?

Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the worldwide web and now Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) says:

“It is being driven by the big companies pushing for something that will eventually fragment the sector. For instance, this push for a .MOBI domain. Why did these people go out and push for a new domain name? That makes no sense. They say it’s because they want a strong mobile Web, but what does that mean? A strong mobile Web is about device independence. It’s about letting users browse the Web from any phone and from any device without limitations. How does .MOBI offer that?”

Basically Berners Lee believes that this would break the device independence of the web.

Others point out that 9 out of 10 .com sites are not designed to be used on a mobile phone and .mobi was created so that mobile users have sites specifically tailored and formatted for phones and on-the-go needs.

According to mobi.com. There is only one standard that guarantees you a site specifically designed for your mobile phone and that’s .mobi. Just like how sites ending in .gov (such as IRS.gov) guarantee you a legitimate government site, sites ending with the .mobi “trustmark” guarantee you a legitimate mobile site.

Consider it a seal of approval that the site is mobile certified. Why waste time shooting in the dark?

I a nutshell if you are targeting mobile web surfers you do need to consider having a separate mobile site following the .mobi standards.

Where is The Mobile Web Going?

Predictions vary, here are some different views.

According to PC World, Apple’s iPad Will Be the Death of the Mobile Web

Tim Berners-Lee states that the goal of W3C is to Make Web access from a mobile device as simple as Web access from a desktop device.

Mobiletech have a new blog post that summarises their views on The mobile highway in 2010

Highlights include:

• Mobile to be driven by new smart handsets such as iPhone, Android – and Kindle mobile devices. Clearly iPad needs to be added to this list.
• The balance of control over mobile internet applications will shift from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.
• Social networks will drive the advance of the mobile internet.

Fierce Mobile Content predict five trends likely to shape the mobile content landscape in the year ahead.

1. Micropayments will galvanize original mobile content efforts
2. Navigation applications will shift from premium to ad-subsidized
3. Mobile commerce will finally go mainstream
4. Ereaders will emerge as the next hotbed of mobile software innovation
5. Olympics, World Cup fail to ignite the mobile TV revolution

According to a Morgan Stanley Study on the mobile internet:

• “Mobile is Ramping Faster than Desktop Internet Did and Will Be Bigger Than Most Think.”
• “5 Trends Are Converging (3G + Social Networking + Video + VoIP + Impressive Mobile Devices).”
• “Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years.”

In summary, the mobile internet is reaching a tipping point with mobile entering an explosive growth phase lasting from 2010 to 2020. See Morgan Stanley Chart below:

Leadership applications are likely to emerge from initiatives by major social networks and hardware vendors. The pace of these will be largely dependent on the success of the W3C mobile initiative.

So How Can You Optimize your Website for Mobile?

Modern Nomads has an interesting post on this topic.

To summarise:

Decide how you would like to allow mobile users to access your page. Options include:

• Automatic generation of mobile pages under the same URL’s
• Having dedicated mobile pages
• Having special (sub)domains for mobile devices.

Decide whether you want to have different content for mobile users. They will often need more specific information and less data due to the small screen size of their mobile device.

Determine how you wish to deliver the mobile content. Options are:

• A specific sub domain (e.g. mobile.interleado.com)
• A .mobi domain

Element Fusion have an optimisation tutorial based on the category of mobile device device. The categories are:

• The iPhone
• Phones that support CSS
• Phones that don’t support CSS

Open Forum has a recent article on this topic that recommends using some tools that

Save you redesigning your website for mobile devices. Basically it recommends:

• For targeting iPhone users
  • Consider using a technology called WebKit to render and display web pages.
• If your website run Wordpress CMS:
  • Check out a plugin called WPTouch that can quickly optimize your website for the iPhone and Android devices.
  • Also look at Carrington Mobile theme.
  • Both of the above options will enable visitors to view the full site, without any mobile optimization, plus they load faster on mobile connections.

Finally Lilengine has a number of useful tips for optimising an existing website including:

• Use external CSS style sheets
• Keep content brief
• Use short titles
• Don’t use flash or frames
• Avoid pop-ups
• Advertise site as mobile compatible
• Put the prefix Tel: before the phone number to enable the mobile device to call with one click
• Put your website into Googles’s local index
• Submit a separate site map for a mobile

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