The mobile Web is dead… Long live the mobile Internet
Submitted by Editors Desk on 22 October, 2009 - 08:58.
P.S. (28-10-09) Thanks to Tamoggemon for including this blog in the latest Carnival of the Mobilists, a weekly roundup of the very best in mobile and wireless blogs.
Periodically, someone somewhere for whatever reason declares the death of the mobile Web. This is welcome because it allows us all to review what the mobile Internet really is and why it is critical.
Mobile Web isn’t just about having a mobile Website – though that is an important part – it’s about recognising that mobile is different. Mobile users have different requirements to PC users and mobile devices have different limitations and capabilities compared with PCs.
Does your company need mobile Web? Here are four simple questions to help you decide:
1) How easy is it to access your PC-orientated Website on your cell-phone?
a) Try it on your own phone via your mobile operator (not wireless LAN – that’s cheating).
b) Test your site on five more phones at mobiReady.
Now imagine it through the customer’s eyes. Let’s say they’re trying to find your address, phone number and/or a map of your location. Even if they have a smart phone*, it probably isn’t a very pleasant experience: slow to load…big pictures… scroll this way, scroll that… can’t find what you want… give up.
*Remember only a fraction of people have smartphones: of all cell-phones sold in Q2 2009, only 14 percent were smartphones (Gartner) – that’s sales, so the installed base will be much smaller.
2) When you want news, for example, on your phone, do you access a Web-orientated news site, when there’s a mobile-friendly one from the competition?
In fact, you’d be pushed to find a big news organization hasn’t got an extensive mobile site.
Eg: apnews.mobi; m.aljazeera.net; bbc.mobi; cnnmobile.com; foxnews.mobi; mobile.nytimes.com; reuters.mobi; mobile.spiegel.de; time.mobi; timesmobile.mobi.
Would these businesses bother, if people were happy to surf PC sites on a mobile? Of course they wouldn’t. As soon as they got a whiff of the visitor numbers, revenues and publicity that their competitors’ mobile sites were receiving, they dived in headfirst.
3) Consider this: do people on the move (on a phone) want the same things as people at their desks (on a PC)?
Mobile visitors don’t tend to browse, they access the Internet because they want something specific and they want it quick – the weather, the news, the location of a shop, the time a film starts, a restaurant review, when the train goes, to book a hotel room, to find out when a delivery is due – mobile sites make it easy.
Eg: weather.mobi; mobile.victoriassecret.com; fandango.mobi; zagat.mobi; hilton.mobi.
4) Can taking advantage of mobile media’s unique attributes make your business more relevant to the consumer?
a) Mobiles can tell you a wealth of information (depending on operator restrictions) about the customer, such as the device used, the mobile operator, even the location. This enables publishers to target services to specific devices, offer localised services and promotions and personalised services based on demographic knowledge about the types of people who use a particular phone – as well as of what the phone is capable.
b) Offer SMS alerts – mobile users will sign up to receive a useful service that adds value, whether that’s the headlines, stock report, bank statement, details of a delivery, delayed flight, promotion or discount. Eg reuters.mobi. They will click through to the mobile site to receive more information or to download a money-off voucher or free game.
c) Remember phones are the ultimate communications tool. Add click-to-call (and click-to-receive-a-call) functionality to make it easy for people to get in contact without having to jot down a number eg zagat.mobi. Give people the option to send a text to a friend with information about your location, opening times, latest product or offer eg autotrader.mobi.
d) Mobile users love to personalise their phones, with ringtones, screensavers etc. eg bmw.mobi; wwf.mobi. They welcome free content and games to help fill their idle time or something special they can send to a friend for Valentine’s Day etc – see this guide for tips and examples. And what better than a mobile voucher that gets a discount at the cinema, store or restaurant, when the phone is shown to the cashier.
e) Mobile Web integrates well with other media, such as outdoor ads. Quick response codes (a barcode that acts as a hyperlink), short codes or Bluetooth will take customers straight to the mobile site to find out more.
f) At the cutting edge, augmented reality can both capture the mobile user’s imagination: find out all about AR here.
The items discussed in 3) and 4) are referred to as the “mobile context”. Consider the context of the typical mobile visitor to your site: where are they, what are they doing, what do they want? What are the capabilities and restrictions of the access device? In what way are these requirements the same as someone sat at a desk in front of a big screen PC?
This is what makes the mobile Web a very different place to the PC Web. That’s why it’s amazing to read an article arguing that people are happy to surf PC Websites on a small screen device, that is designed for 1) making calls; 2) sending texts; 3) fitting in a pocket; 4) accessing the Internet.
Considering that number of cell-phones subscribers globally dwarfs the number of PCs (and is growing at an exponential rate), how long will it be before those people, who like shouting, start shouting (wrongly) the “PC Web is dead”?
How does your PC Website look on a mobile? Will your customers be happy with that? Comment below or email editor (at) mobiThinking.com.
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Hmmm, you guys seem to have a very American/old fashioned view of the mobile internet. Things have changed a lot over the past decade or so with mobile web users wanting the option to have exactly the same content they can get from a desktop browser. We're not just "people on the move" who're away from our primary web device (the computer) anymore. A lot of us have our phones as our primary data based communications devices and don't even bother with computers. We don't just log on for a minute or two to grab a bitesize piece of information anymore, we're constantly online with data being pulled to our devices through multiple applications, e-mail being pushed to us all day, and our browsers active most of the day as we stay connected to various full websites, search full news sites for information and keep updated on the various social networks that we use. In short, the average mobile web user these days is the average desktop web user from just three years ago and the gap is closing every day.
I view more Youtube videos than most of my PC using friends, have more of an impact online, run a blog (that is the 138th most popular in a site with over 3 million users, mostly on PCs) and design the CSS for it, update my Twitter account regularly, and do so much more all from my phone every single day. These are things I've been doing for ten or eleven years and I've only recently gotten a smartphone two years ago as my needs increased slightly beyond the scope of regular feature phones. Yes I'm an early adaptor, but as time has gone on I've been proven time and again to be the shape of things to come, and the majority of mobile web users are starting to follow my lead.
The annoying thing we find is when sites automatically redirect us to mobile sites which have much less functionality than we're after. Kudos to the site designer here by the way for actually offering a choice to users. A much better idea though is to set up a mobile friendly stylesheet so that the same information can be displayed in a mobile friendly manner without cutting down the functionality. The most popular mobile browser in the world actually has two view modes that allow users to see the site as it appears on desktop, or to see the mobile stylesheet, after all. Don't give us seperate mobile sites (which are a temporary phenomenon designed to take advantage of the weaker mobile web browsers that were the mainstream five years ago and are now just bloody annoying) when you can make your full site more mobile friendly to actually offer something of quality to your users.
Terrific piece. We are launching the world's first global events site that features 34 categories designed for people to add events, edit, and view to help make decisions while on the go. Our primary requirement for mobile was and remains to apply the mobiforge best practices and actively use the MobiReady site. What I find interesting is that large firms don't appreciate that m.site.com and wap.site.com are not indexable according to Mobiforge yet many of these large companies do not use the .mobi domain.
The Mobiforge site is the best resource on the planet for mobile app development or for launching mobile sites. Well done article. We launch our mobile site in a few short weeks. In the meantime, you can check out our site at http://www.goseedo.net Our .mobi site is in the final stages, so check back.
Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.
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