Spin a More Mobile Web

BY LEE GIMPEL

Take your website to the next level by adapting it to reach on-the-go users.

A September 2000 article in strategy+business magazine predicted that, “By 2004, the worldwide use of wireless devices to access the internet will surpass PCs.” Yet, eight years later, the mobile internet revolution hasn’t quite arrived. In fact, the Pew Internet & American LifeProject found that last year, only 41% of adult Americans had logged onto the internet away from home or work via a wireless laptop or handheld.

But the dot-com era enthusiasm is creeping back. For example, ABI Research predicts that the number of mobile internet browsers will jump from 76 million in 2007 to nearly 700 million in 2013. And MSNBC reported that the New York Times’ mobile site saw 14 million page views in February 2008 versus 500,000 at the beginning of 2007.

So is this the year the web goes mobile? Will new devices, coupled with cheaper data plans, finally catapult the mobile web into the mainstream? Maybe—or maybe not. But because so many of today’s consumers head online before making purchase decisions, it still makes sense to adapt your online presence to mobile users.

First of all, remember that mobile users diff er from people sitting at desks. they want to accomplish specific tasks quickly, says Amy Mischler, vice president of identity and brand services for dotMobi, the registry for the .mobi domain, which is specifically for mobile sites. To this end, you not only need to make sure your website fits in a small screen, but you also must rethink your structure and content. Someone using a bank’s mobile website probably won’t be checking mortgage rates; rather, he or she will be looking for ATMs or the ability to pay bills.

thankfully, says Nirav Mehta, author of Mobile Web Development, many of today’s mobile browsers—especially Opera’s SSR, available on Apple’s iPhone and Nokia’s S60—do a good job rendering websites that were designed for standard computer screens.

Even if your site is usable, though, it may not look and function as you wish.

With mobile websites, less formatting (including images) is more. Tools like www..iyhy.com and www.skweezer.net can give you an idea of what a stripped-down site looks like. there are also free or low-cost applications to build a mobile site: www.buildmymobi.com and www.site.mobi, to name a couple.

Accommodating mobile users doesn’t mean turning your site into a boring, unformatted one. Instead, set up a separate site; you can name it, for example, www.mobile.your-domain.com. Your web host usually knows if a user is accessing it from a mobile device, and a bit of code can automatically display mobile-specific pages. Quick fixes—try the PHP file from www.mikeindustries.com—take care of the code for you and optimize your existing site for small screens.

“It’s going to be huge,” Mischler says of the mobile web. Still, she cautions, “It’s important to set your expectations and realize that you’re at the beginning of something [that] can really diff erentiate yourself as a result.”