For the past 10 years, mobile phone manufacturers have been putting Web browsers on mobile phones. And last year we, consumers, woke up and started to use those browsers for accessing Web content.
If you already know basic Web technology, then with a little additional training you can learn the mobile Web very quickly. And although there are a few minor technical differences in the way that you code your content for mobile, the biggest challenge is the way that you need to think about mobile phones. Most people think of them as disabled PCs, but this is a mistake. A mobile phone isn’t a disabled PC, it’s just different both in terms of capabilities and in terms of context.
From a capabilities point of view, the mobile phone is a phone, a wireless instant messaging device, a camera, a GPS unit, and a Personal Information Manager (PIM). Yes, mobile phones might have limited keypads and displays compared with PCs, but they also have capabilities that the typical PC has never dreamed of.
But it is more than just technical capabilities; the context of the mobile phone is also different. The mobile phone is after all, mobile. It is mobile because it is always at hand, and it is this what makes the mobile phone a computer even more personal than our home computer. Although we might consider someone using our PC, we feel very uncomfortable when someone uses our phone and we are left without it.
When considering building out a great mobile Web site experience, it is the combination of unique capabilities and context of the mobile phone that we need to consider and exploit. And it is these differences that open up new opportunities to the content owner who wants to publish to a market that is much larger than that of the PC: the mobile phone audience. And many Web content providers have already learned this and are starting to exploit the mobile Web.
In August of 2007, dotMobi did a scan of the Web (.com, .net, .mobi, .co.uk, and .de domains), which found 26,000 made-for-mobile websites. In February 2008, the scan was repeated, and this time, 150,000 made-for-mobile sites were discovered. And finally, in March 2009, the scan was repeated yet again, but this time it discovered 1.3 million made-for-mobile sites. The mobile Web is truly exploding, and I predict that when we look back at technology history, 2008 will become known as the first year of the decade of the mobile Web.
And although going from 150,000 to 1.3 million made-for-mobile sites is phenomenal growth, there is a lot more to come, for it is only a little more than 1 percent of the total fixed Web that was surveyed. There is a lot more to do and a lot more growth potential.
So if you have a website, what should you be thinking and what can you do to exploit the mobile Web and further monetize your content?
As previously mentioned, the mobile Web is different because the capabilities and context of the devices are different. Thus, you need to learn more about these differences. Fortunately there are resources available to help you do this.
- The free mobiThinking.com site will help you understand what others are doing and how to design your site.
- The inexpensive .mobi names (available from most domain name registrars) will provide you a name for you mobile site that will be easily found by the search engines because it provides your mobile site with an entry in the Internet Zone files.
- The free mobiForge.com site will help your developers with the technical issues to get the development right.
- The free ready.mobi site provides testing tools to make sure that your mobile site is encoded correctly and will make suggestions on how to improve it.
- DeviceAtlas.com will provide you with an affordable mobile device database that allows you to adapt your content to best fit on every mobile phone on the market.
Finally, consider the following. You’ve made an investment in Web technologies to deliver your content. Your customers have made an investment in mobile technology that is capable of displaying your content if formatted correctly. The challenge in these tough economic times is simply to connect the investments already made by both sides. And the best way to learn the mobile Web is simply by doing it. So take your content, build your first mobile site, and start on the road of learning about this new channel to reach your customers.
Paul Nerger is vice president of Advanced Services and Applications for dotMobi.
This article originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of AVN Online. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscribe.
