Mobile sites

The mobile device phenomenon

In March 2007 a market research report found that 64% of U.S. mobile devices are internet enabled, and that will be a lot higher now.
Also mobile devices outnumber desktop and laptop computers approximately 20 to 1 worldwide.

(Report by firm media-screen.com)

So businesses have got to be ready for mobile web browsing to increase dramatically.

There are three options open to website owners:

[1] Do nothing and hope:

Hope that your existing website, or the new site, will be able to present well on the numerous mobile devices (each with very different ways of interpreting style information and it must be said, many are very maverick at this) AND able to display well on desktops and laptops.
Also a lot of mobile phones do not have a pointing device (mouse) which makes sideways scrolling very difficult or impossible.

So potentially you could be excluding a high percentage of potential customers from your website, which obviously does not make good business sense.

[2] Have one website that is able to cope with all devices:

We design and build websites so that they don’t disintegrate when they are forced to display within a small area. Many websites actually do fall apart, or the user ends up with a blank screen.
The touch screen mobiles, and bigger screened devices are more forgiving when it comes to displaying a large area, but they can fail badly on certain elements like navigation and rich media content.

Even if a mobile device displays the website correctly, it is tedious to scroll down very big pages, which would be no problem on a desktop computer.

Some web designers have gone down the route of analyzing all the statistics of the mobile device and then trying to dish up the correct format for it. This sounds ideal, but in practice the mobile smacks into a wall of code that immediately drains the battery life and there is still the risk that the wrong content is given to the device.
The other problem is that devices are surprisingly difficult to name correctly – especially as some mobiles actually cloak themselves to look like a desktop computer!

Boundary Products Web Design has done extensive testing on actual mobile devices (not just evaluators) and the conclusion we have come to is to have a one site strategy provided the amount of text and images are kept within limits.
For this scenario we will design and build you a site that can tap into the desktop AND mobile market to maximize the number of potential customers because it would be safe for all users, apart from very old mobiles. As the majority of mobile users upgrade their devices regularly this would not be a problem.

Our pages give excellent results on many devices – please ask for a test result report and we will email it to you.

The advantage of a one site strategy is that it is a LOT easier to keep it up to date with information and images.

[3] Have a separate specialized mobile website alongside the conventional site:

We at Boundary Products Web Design can design and build you a specialized mobile site with the mobile specific ‘dot mobi’ domain name, which would be very lean on scripts (ie Javascript), images and text.

There is an additional logistical burden with this two site strategy. The problem is actually in the administration of having two sites which sounds okay in theory, but in practice in a busy office, only one website may get updated and it becomes time consuming to check one site with the other.

The situation now:

A high percentage of websites would, at best be a mobile surfers nightmare, and at worst the mobile surfer would not even be able to get on to the website – at all!

How about checking out the top UK ‘professional mobile website designers’ from a Google search?

On the W3C MobileOK Checker, Boundary Products Web Design gets about 88% which is well into the last ‘safe’ green segment on the chart.
The W3C MobileOK Checker won’t guarantee that the page you are testing will display well on a mobile device, but if the page has a low score you can be reasonably sure that the page is badly designed and built, and will not display correctly – if at all!

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What to do next:
You can check any website for free on the Mobile friendly checker page.
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