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Upwardly Mobile - Why Your Web Strategy Needs to Think Portable
Anne Thomas – COO WappleFor the last ten years I have heard someone, somewhere say
ʻ
this is the year for mobile
ʼ
. It
ʼ
sbecome a standing joke in our industry. From SMS to WAP, it seems everything has been tried andfailed. Well now it
ʼ
s my turn and, at the risk of being laughed at, I am going to tell you
ʻ
this is theyear for mobile!
ʼ
 Here
ʼ
s why.Over the past few years, consumers have embraced – at remarkable speed – new digital devicesand service models to have immediate access to personal and business information, stay in touchwith their social networks and make their lives more efficient and fun. Most recently, they havegobbled up a variety of mobile and smart phones such as Apple
ʼ
s iPhone and services likeFacebook and Twitter. People today are used to talking to or texting someone half way around theworld; they are taking pictures and videos while walking down the street, as well as conductingmobile banking and retail transactions. Consumers are downloading games and music, trackingwhere they are on a global positioning system and watching movies or live television on-demandby using one mobile device.The rapid pace of consumer adoption of new digital convergence models has given consumersaround the world the power to demand what they want, when they want it, and how they expect toget it. As a result, this power has put added pressure on telecommunications and mediacompanies, as well as consumer electronics manufacturers, to deliver the goods according toconsumers
ʼ
perception of value and trust.From email to music, from maps to social media and a myriad of applications, all interfacing intoyour favourite online services, the mobile internet lies at the heart of all digital media. This is justthe start. Even personally speaking, I think at least ten percent of my
ʻ
online
ʼ
time now is done viamy smartphone – my Twitter and Facebook updates die when my mobile battery runs out or I amout of range.The mobile internet and mobile internet presences are rapidly becoming a fact of life. So isn
ʼ
t ittime you got one?
Your Mobile Internet Strategy
Currently one billion people in the world are online – that
ʼ
s about a sixth of the world
ʼ
s population.However, four billion people – that
ʼ
s two-thirds of the population – have a mobile phone. It reachesinto some of the most remote parts of our planet. No roads to dig up and put in wires, a fashionaccessory that demands upgrading at least three times as often as your PC, we are talking one ofthe fastest growing and widest reaching technologies known to man.
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Here we boldly go, crossing the digital threshold, clutching our mobile device in hand, smiling allthe way to early retirement, right? No self-respecting
ʻ
cyber-digital
ʼ
mobile man, or woman, needever worry again that their creed will not be taken seriously: digital communications are themainstream and the mobile internet plays an increasingly crucial role in stitching it all together.So what does all of this mean for you?It means that even if you've been sceptical about mobile, we seem to be reaching an inflectionpoint where it's hard to not to take it seriously. Now is a good time to be thinking about a mobilestrategy.Whether your strategy means making sure that your website can be viewed properly on mobiledevices or entails more involved and dedicated mobile initiatives, by putting a mobile strategy inplace now you can help ensure that your online business is prepared to take advantage of thegrowth opportunities that the ripening mobile internet seems set to offer over the next severalyears.Yet according to a recent survey conducted by Forbes magazine, only eight percent of the Fortune1000 companies actually have any mobile web presence or strategy whatsoever. This is almostincredulous as it stands, but it gets worse. The latest PWC/Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)report on e-commerce states that between two and seven percent of all web traffic comes frommobile devices, while global e-commerce revenues for 2008 totalled £117.6bn. So even allowingfor a wide error margin, two percent of mobile web traffic could, in theory, account for over £1.2bnin e-commerce revenues!While that's almost certainly an exaggeration, I do think that online publishers, e-tailers andinternet entrepreneurs who look at the mobile internet with scepticism would be wise to considerthat it just might offer the same sort of potential seen when the internet we know today was firststarting to come into focus.
Mobile Friendly Websites
Despite long-time web design guru Jakob Nielsen
ʼ
s recent report which pronounced the mobileweb experience
ʻ
miserable
ʼ
, I think he
ʼ
s probably done the whole industry a bit of a favour really byhighlighting the fact that to make the mobile web truly
ʻ
usable
ʼ
, you actually have to design the webfor mobile.I
ʼ
m a little dubious about the research itself, but mainly that
ʼ
s because I already knew that getting atest subject to access a full website on a mobile browser is UI suicide. I
ʼ
m not disregarding thefindings at all, because I agree with the conclusions. I just feel that the approach could have beento
 
look more closely at sites already designed with mobile in mind, which might have helped usadvance the cause rather than assist the stragglers.To summarise the problems in his research findings:
ʻ
Websites don
ʼ
t work on mobile because theyare designed for a big screen and mouse controlled GUI.
ʼ
The solution, of course, is to actuallymake dynamic and optimising services for mobile. As a developer or designer, once you begin onthis path, usability common sense kicks in, mainly because you have to work and test on mobiledevices during development.For all those e-commerce and Fortune 1000 companies out there who already have a web
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