As some may know, I have been immersing myself in the mobile web so far this year.
I find the mobile environment fascinating.
Familiarity breeds laziness
The challenge of designing and developing for the small screen has renewed and re-invigorated my enthusiasm after 16 years of ‘doing’ desktop and becoming extremely lazy in the process as the previous obstacles surrounding bandwidth and technology have largely diminished in the last few years. This has allowed all but total freedom in relation to serving up a diet of rich media and complex mashable mixes which all come together in the blink of an eye on my flat panel 22″ monitor.
1995 Re-visited
The current mobile vibe also reminds me very much of those days back in 1994 / 1995 when very few knew what ‘WWW’ meant – and those who did were either feted as forward-thinking gurus or branded as charlatans and geeks.
It will be extremely important to our business (but what is it? – CEO anon)
Given how ‘desktop’ WWW has become so imprinted on the mind of even the most resolute hermit and emblazoned on the most miniscule available area of product packaging, it’s even all the remarkable, then, that recent research by Bigmouthmedia suggests that despite 89.2% of UK businesses believing ‘mobile’ will be very important to them in 2011 onwards, over 75% have very little understanding of it and no clear strategy for adopting it. (See http://is.gd/dYD1u )
Certainly there is acknowledgement and understanding of the mobile as a potent voice and text communication device but not, as yet, the growing challenger to the desktop web.
This maybe part due to the hitherto expense of mobile internet data plans but now that almost unlimited access is available for around just £5 a month this is no longer a barrier to most and the use of mobiles being used to access the web has grown enormously in the last year.
It may also have been partly to do with a limited range of handsets capable of providing a decent mobile web browsing experience but again that is now a thing of the past with the range of amazing devices now available on low monthly rental and even not that expensive to buy.
App V WAP
What has certainly caught the imagination – if not necessarily the full understanding – of consumers and businesses is the idea of ‘Apps’ – small footprint software modules that need to be downloaded and installed on your mobile but which then can seemingly do remarkably useful or inane ‘stuff’ and even provide access to online content or link up with a device’s on-board GPS to show how many yards you are away from the nearest lap-dancing club.
Ah – but then 50% of the world who have just gone and bought the smallest shiniest phone with the biggest screen realises that they won’t be able to join the lap-dancing club audience because – surprise surprise – err – they can’t actually get that app for their particular handset.
Now, if only there was a decent mobile WWW and my handset had a capable web browser just like my desktop. It wouldn’t matter what brand of handset, operating system or web browser I had, I could Google and……
Well guess what? – true mobile web exists and it’s here – and it’s called WAP (2.0).
All modern handsets have extremely capable in-built web browsers can typically access WAP over a combination of Wi-Fi (including your own wireless home of office network) / 3G and HSDPA, the latest high-speed mobile connection.
The only problem is that once you’ve connected with the mobile wave, the surfing experience tends to be rather limited in terms of mobile-friendly content.
After several fruitless laps of the M25 we gave in and went home
‘Mobile-friendly’? But surely my shiny state of the art desktop website with umpteen live news feeds, large-scale graphics and 75 different subsections can easily be viewed by doing that pinchy-thumb-and-forefinger thing which I’ve seen on those sexy TV ads? I mean, I may have really fat stubby little fingers but even I could do that after a couple days.
Well, you could but it wouldn’t be a greatly rewarding experience after you’ve waited an age for all those bits to download, failed to play any video and completely lost your way because you can’t remember where the navigation menus are as you drag your finger haphazardly around the screen in ever-decreasing frustrated circles – oh and just to cap it all, the time it’s taken to do all that has eaten well into your data plan and certainly cost you a finger and toe.
Navigating a desktop website via mobile is like trying to find your way around Harrods blindfolded.
Mobile rules – OK?!
The Worldwide Web Consortium (they who oversee WWW standards) have produced a rather nifty online website testing kit called ‘Mobile OK’ to see how mobile-friendly your current ‘desktop’ website is.
Just copy and paste your website address (or that of your competitors) into the form at http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ – press the button, stand well clear and, in most cases, prepare yourself for a nasty surprise….
The really scary thing is that many web developers working on current websites are not yet up to speed with mobile and so are not yet taking into account things that could and should be done to make web content mobile friendly.
It’s a whole new ball game. Normal rules don’t apply.
Early adopters propensity to consume = ROI satisfaction (or thereabouts…)
The likelihood is that in a fairly short while many business and website owners are going to need to do something to their existing website if they’re going to be as equally successful in the mobile world as they have been in its desktop counterpart.
But there is obviously a fair amount of educating to do again before the required critical mass is achieved and the ball starts to roll of its own accord. Déjà vu 1995.
The early-adopters will of course stand to gain a distinct advantage and steal a march on the mobile web as the rest of the world plays catch-up.
Providing a mobile version of an existing website isn’t quite as bad as starting from scratch. At least you know the overall thematic structure, design and content even if it does need to be substantially re-jigged.
For those on the verge of re-vamping their existing desktop site, now would be a good time to take mobile into account and bind it into the equation.
But what about ongoing maintenance? Surely having two sites to maintain is an extra issue? Well, it could be, obviously, but if planned well and the sites are made to be database-driven and perhaps some content is fed e.g. via RSS then both sites can be updated automatically from the same source.
For most, the big mistake would be to do nothing, ignore it and hope it goes away.
Tag!
As an aside, another potential new and interesting technology is ‘tags’.
Imagine pointing and shooting your mobile phone camera at a small image printed in an advertisement, on a poster, in a shop window out of hours and being automatically connected to a relevant website which gives you all the info you want to know – and all without doing anything other than pressing the camera shutter. That’s what ‘tag’s do.
‘Tag’s are essentially barcodes which hold a website address. The mobile phone camera picks up the barcode and links to the mobile browser which fires up the internet connection.
‘Tags’ are going to be rally big. They already are in the Far East but are only just filtering through to the West.
Anyway, that’s enough for today. A change is as good as a rest so I’m off to just do another five hours of mobile coding before getting into bed with ‘Auntie’ and catching the latest BBC news headlines on my mobile before I nod off dreaming of CSS, cache, DTDs, content-headers, user-agents, WURFL, HTML5, AJAX, Flash and other household cleaning agents …..