This article struck me as particularly misleading for those seeking genuine advice on mobile strategy and creating a future friendly mobile web presence. After some interesting discussion around this on Twitter it’s become apparent that there are many mixed messages out there leading to a significant misunderstanding of mobile web on design, usabilty and delivery to multiple devices.

It is only possible to adopt the  methodology of “one site fits all” if you are using a technology platform that optimises the content to each device at a granular level. If you don’t use such technology and decide to approach mobile web with only an understanding of web practices then you would disregard a decade of experience and development held by mobile web specialists. Additionally you could very well be making some critical errors in mobile design, user-experience, device rendering & marketing such as those made by American Airlines (placing QR codes in their in-flight magazine) or I Cant Believe it’s Not Butter (series of iPhone ads linking to a non-mobile optimised site).  Specialists ensure successful implementation of mobile friendly content suited to all, rather than just a small screen desktop or a discriminatory experience that discounts a large percentage of your consumers.

Over the coming few weeks I aim to talk in greater depth around these issues dispelling some of these myths and clarifying what a mobile web specialist can offer over and above a web agency and would welcome your thoughts, feedback and questions on this topic.

Coming Next: Demystifying Mobile Web Development | Design and Usability

The first and foremost problem dealing with styling and mobile optimisation client side, is that the user viewing the website on their mobile will still incur download hits for assets and elements they may not even see.

Take for example this Media Query and CSS (commonly used in Responsive Web Design)

@media all and (max-width: 320px) {
       #largeElement {
             display: none;
       }
}

Now, all devices will still download this element, yet the user will not see it. A pointless waste of kilobytes.

When using Wapple’s Technology, we can detect what device the user has and send appropriate images and assets at the correct size which does not clog up their downloading of the website.

Take for example http://wapple.net – if you examined this website in YSlow you would see that the weight of the homepage when viewed on a mobile is around 150Kb. Very streamlined. Compare this to http://www.apple.com/uk/. Their desktop site weighs a total of 387kb, and in this unoptimised state, 387kb is unnecessarily downloaded to the user’s phone.

The trend seems to be that some people will develop their desktop site and add the mobile version as an afterthought, this results in certain small screen websites looking, frankly, dull. Recently, The Boston Globe made the headlines as it was the first large website that was redesigned using Responsive techniques. Now, even in this article, the phrase “Responsive design allows the Globe’s content to be refitted to any screen size available automatically” uses the word “refitted”, it just doesn’t sound very elegant. What seems to happen with Responsive Web Design is that content and styling have to be kept minimal and very text heavy, now simple single column websites adapt well to this approach but anything above and beyond struggles to remain fluid. A tweet from Simurai details this very succinctly: “My excitement for Responsive Web Design is fading a bit. It’s great for simple websites, but not enough for more complex web apps.”

The user of a smartphone buys a smartphone because they want a powerful, fun gadget in their hands. Responsive Web Design allows nothing more than styling tweaks. The real power of a mobile experience is using technologies such as Geolocation, SMS integration and now even, the phone’s Gyroscope. 360 Panorama have accessed the iPhone’s Gyroscope in Mobile Safari to give a native app feel to their Panoramic images.

Wapple were proud to be involved in the building and developing of the Microsoft Office 2010 mobile website, this site uses the smartphone’s GPS to access the user’s Geolocation and tell them where they could buy Microsoft Office 2010 around them.

“There are 5.3 billion mobile subscribers (that’s 77 percent of the world population)“. In a nutshell, this means that a LOT of users will be accessing your website through a mobile phone. Don’t just squeeze your website into a small screen, give people a mobile experience.

What we loved: The homepage wasn’t too heavy despite the content so loaded on a range of mobile devices…BUT this site was designed for desktop not mobile!
What we’d love to see improved: Everything! At the moment Play are delivering their desktop website to all mobile devices meaning a lot of zooming in for content and zooming out for context – a classic example of mobile laziness! The site will frustrate the mobile consumer and they simply won’t stick around for all of the unnecessary content loading on all of the internal pages. Play would likely report significant increases in turnover just like Gap did if they mobilized their website with technology like Architect.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of PLAY mobile is and cast your vote below… http://play.com

What we loved:The website is relatively uncluttered because of the nature of the service with great branding so it is not too badly presented to mobile devices but…
What we’d love to see improved: This is a desktop site!  118 is a huge directory service brand – they would benefit greatly from offering mobile-relevant experiences such as ‘Search near me’ and ‘click-to-call’.  The brand is perfect for mobile web and they must get way above average hits to this URL from mobile consumers currently but they simply are not maximising the opportunity.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of 118 mobile is and cast your vote below… http://www.118.com/

It’s hard to see any short-term prospects for the company as its new CEO, Stephen Elop grapples with the charred timber of the ‘burning deck’ he so memorably described earlier this year.

But of course Elop only refers to its Symbian Operating System. We think it’s much too early to sound the death knell for Nokia. This is a company that used to make rubber products and sell wood pulp. It has a history of re-inventing and re-energising itself and while its relationship with Microsoft still has some way to go, this may be the saviour of the company.

We think that Windows Mobile 7 is an excellent OS and the future looks brighter for Nokia once this reaches critical mass. With Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer recently announcing increased marketing spend and industry mavens very positive about its impact, Nokia may well surprise the Cassandras and naysayers. It’s going to be an interesting 12 months.

Google Wallet, American Express Serve, Mastercard Paypass, Visa Wallet and Isis, a mobile payment based on the near-field communication platform, have all being launched to service this market, and while industry insiders expect near-field communication (NFC) to become the dominant platform over the next three years, it is brands that need to act now if they are to benefit from this huge revenue stream.

Potential customers of mobile payments have little interest in which platform they will use, only that it works whenever they want to make a purchase. Similarly they will insist on the same from the mobile websites of companies they would like to buy from.

Any integration of a mobile payments platform must be done in parallel with a mobile website that is optimised. With digital goods making up 40% of that huge $690 billion figure, brands need to choose their partners wisely, and to merge that decision with a well-thought mobile strategy… and a mobile website that is fast, secure and scalable.

Well, I care deeply and I imagine you do too. I care for EVERY mobile OS and ALL the many thousands of mobile devices that run on them and therefore I was compelled to read.  To my shock I discovered that the individual who asked the question does not care and dismisses a vast percentage of mobile web consumers in the US!

He is Jeff Williams, a UX lead at Marketing Drive and he publishes the fact that he and the company he represents don’t in fact know how to automatically optimize for ALL devices & browsers, yet they are building a mobile experience for the 4th largest retailer in US.

That retailer has, no doubt, invested heavily in their mobile strategy and trusted their mobile site with Jeff and friends at Marketing Drive but their mobile site is only going to run on Android and iOS because when Jeff realised he couldn’t make it work on the others his colleague said “Who cares”!

Wanted! For crimes against mobile OS

Oh dear!  Perhaps somebody might advise me who the fourth largest retailer in the US is so that I may inform them of current traffic stats in their region.

64% of US traffic to the many thousands of mobile sites and major brand ad campaigns on Wapple is generated by Android (34%) and iOS (30%) combined therefore 36%, I’ll repeat that, THIRTY SIX PERCENT is generated by all other operating systems that Jeff and his colleague don’t care about.

Admittedly, when I first read his article I was a little upset and may have suggested he was being lazy but let’s be clear here I don’t hate Jeff (who could), on reflection I can kind of see how he gave up trying.  He was attempting to create single versions of the site for each OS (let alone the thousands of variants he would have encountered trying to adapt to all the makes and models).  If he had built the site on Wapple technology he would have built just 1, I’ll repeat that too, JUST ONE SINGLE SITE and then applied simple conditions to it so only the smart phones got the cool features he was trying to implement.

Jeff, if you’re reading this, get in touch, it’s not too late to fix.

Google recently released figures showing mobile web traffic after Mother’s Day this year (May 9th). Not only did mobile search queries for ‘flowers’ make up 33% of all searchs, the numbers doubled over the course of 12 months – a wonderful opportunity for those flower sellers who have optimized their web content for mobile consumers, not so great for those who didn’t.

Moreover, while desktop searches increased from Monday to Friday in the week prior to Mother’s Day, they tanked on the weekend. Conversely, mobile queries increased all week and then PEAKED at the weekend, indicating that customers were using the mobile channel as their choice for buying flowers for their mums.

While ‘Mother’s Day gifts’ were consistent across both channels it would imply that buying flowers are the last-minute choice of customers and mobile was the channel they used. This appears to be a trend that will replicate itself for other celebrations such as Christmas, Easter and Halloween.

Perhaps Google will repeat this exercise for Father’s Day and although search terms for dads are unlikely to involve flowers, searches for ‘Father’s Day lunch’ or ‘Father’s Day breakfast’ could be similar spikes for mobile. This is an interesting phenomenon that we will be researching further over the next few months.

Trouble is – the old version of WordPress Mobile Admin didn’t have any of the human readable text wrapped in those functions so it was only available in English, despite the fact that probably 95% of the text it used had already been translated. By going through and wrapping those text segments has meant that the entire Mobile dashboard has been mobilized.

Internationalization was where we spent most of our time on for this release, but it wasn’t the only focus. In addition, we’ve looked at textarea boxes and in particular, anywhere you can enter text in the mobile dashboard – editing posts and pages for example.

We found that some phones have troubled scrolling with lots of text in text input boxes (iPhone’s for example), so we’ve added some JavaScript in to help things run a bit smoother. And because we’re using Wapple Architect, phones that don’t support JavaScript don’t get it.

We hope you enjoy the update to the plugin and would love to hear from you if you use WordPress Mobile Admin in a language other than English and if you use an iPhone and scrolling is a bit nicer!

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/28744c96-176a-11df-87f6-00144feab49a,dwp_uuid=4dce8136-4a24-11da-b8b1-0000779e2340.html?nclick_check=1

So, lets be clear once again. Installed apps are OK but they’re expensive, tied to a particular OS, distributed through crowded and controlled channels, hard to spread virally and, well, so 2009.

Web Apps for mobile are cheap to develop, OS agnostic, browser independent (if you build them using Wapple technology), free to distribute and easy to spread. Oh, and this really IS the year of the mobile web so if you want to live in the now then mobile Web Apps are the only place to be!