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

A tale of descent into madness, the collapse of self and ultimately submission and through that redemption, the character, Pink, of whom the story is told, sings of the realisation that his relationship with his wife is finally over. While travelling, he continuously calls on the phone only to find that there’s ‘Nobody Home’.

Of course, back in 1979 all our phones were just there – home. Probably in the hallway, maybe by the bedside too, but certainly not in our pockets wherever we went.

Pink’s interpretation of the ringing out is the realisation of what he already knows. This isn’t simply a case of unfortunate timing, it’s really over. He has [sarcastically] “amazing powers of observation”.

The reality back then was that if you called at the wrong time, you wouldn’t get an answer. No call log, no voicemail, no sms. Catch someone or try again tomorrow.

Not so today.

If you call someone on their mobile you expect to reach them. No call can be missed, no message unheard. We can make direct connections with people wherever they are in the world, instantly.

And this is true of customers connecting to brands. Customers are using their phones right now to reach out to the businesses and brands that matter to them. But they aren’t always getting through. Often, there’s nobody home – and that can be the end of that relationship too.

Now you probably know that I’m not going to keep talking about voice coms today. In 2012 consumers are using their mobile phones for a lot more than that.

I’m not talking about dialling a number and having it ring out, I’m talking about consumers hitting a url only to find that the page doesn’t load, fit or work on their phone. That’s when, in the case of mobile web, there’s nobody home.

Prompting this piece is the news that among 100 leading brands in fashion, beauty, hospitality, jewellery and retailers, only two-thirds have mobile-optimized websites, and few of those are set up for users to shop, according to a survey by digital think tank L2.

This should be shocking, although with my own ‘amazing powers of observation’ it comes as no surprise. The brand manager and marketers that should be listening to this are letting the phone ring out.  Those that ignored mobile web and invested purely in native apps are finding there was no point, the apps stores are not where the customer is calling.  They are missing the customers and the relationships they had are breaking down.

With an increasing amount of organic traffic hitting websites from mobile devices now is the time to make certain that mobile web is firmly set as part of digital strategy. It is cold hard fact that this is how users want to interact and if they are shut out they go elsewhere.

The solution is easy. Mobile web is not difficult when you work with people like us at Wapple. We can help you answer the call of mobile web. Sure, there are some challenges but we’ve been there many, many times.

In Pink’s case, he makes the wrong choices and descends into madness. Now that cautionary line may be a little too strong for this tale but I think that we can all agree that not answering the call of consumers who want to connect is madness in itself.

I’m done now. Kind of a different post to normal this time. I’m certain that there are plenty of you who have never even listened to Pink Floyd. I guess I really am that old now but it’s never too late you know. Just, please, if you buy it on iTunes, play it in order not on shuffle!

The overriding reason for this has been the spread of smartphones and much has changed over the course of a year. According to research company IDC, 100.9 million smartphones shipped in the final quarter of 2010, a figure that was up 87.2% on the previous year.

Eleven months later and a seminal report from data analysts Neilsen showed how things had moved on in 2011. In the US the vast majority of those under the age of 44 now have smartphones and usage was significantly up across the board.

It’s not just the 40% of teenagers who own one, but also the 18% (up 50% on 2010) of people over the age of 65 who have them. Just as importantly not only do they own them, they are using them and the UK is as enthusiastic as they are across the Atlantic in the US.

Research last month from EPiserver reported that 59% of UK consumers now own a smartphone and 18% have a tablet device… and more than a third have used them to make a purchase, a figure that will undoubtedly rise as the Christmas season approaches.

These are exciting times. At Wapple we have been predicting these numbers for years – sometimes in the face of opposition that didn’t believe that mobile could ever stand against the bigger brother that is desktop internet.

But today many people reach for their phones before opening up a laptop or even moving to a desktop PC.

So how did we get here? What were the events of 2011 that caused the mobile web to hit critical mass? Naturally when it comes to tipping points there are multiple factors but Google’s advances in the mobile space have ignited the sector and consequently caused mobile marketing to explode.

Google’s Android is now the dominant operating system after finally taking over from Apple in 2011 and the company has thrown its weight behind several initiatives to support the industry. In Q2 Google launched ‘Google Sites Mobile Landing Pages’, aka Google Mobilize, a new tool to help SMEs launch mobile websites.

This provided simple, template-based sites for customers and was free for them to use, although this was not a philanthropic gesture on behalf of the company. This was all about mobile advertising revenue with SMEs signing up for the AdWords platform, not that SMEs seemed to mind too much.

The company followed this in Q3 with the launch of Google Wallet as it joined American Express Serve, Mastercard Paypass, Visa Wallet and Isis in offering mobile payments services. According to mobile analyst G + (not related) this market will be worth a whopping $670 million by 2015 of which 40% will be ‘digital goods’.

Last and not least the company recently announced GoMo, a significant signpost in the natural development road of the mobile web. Google had previously announced that 79% of advertisers had sites that were not optimised for mobile devices, a truly extraordinary figure. The GoMo initiative helps agencies and companies by using 12 mobile web experts to create mobile-friendly sites.

For example, mobile ad networks serve billions of page views so this is a huge opportunity for their advertisers but often they waste this by linking their banner ad to their website, rather than a mobile optimised version. GoMo will help prevent this and the unwanted 80%+ bounce rate that comes from a non-optimised mobile web site.

Google know that mobile web services represent the future of our connected lives. The browser is at the heart of their devices, both mobile phones and the new Chromebook laptops. Wapple once suggested that entering a URL on a mobile would be easier than dialling a number. Today we see the Google bar on the homescreen and the dialler stored away like any other application. Interfaces like this from Google have subtly influenced users to further the journey that already started – a shift towards consumption of digital services through the devices they carry in their pockets and places on the bedside table every night.

But it wasn’t all down to Google. Other companies jumped into the space with their own positive statements on mobile. Global brand Unilever announced that it would use mobile as its primary marketing channel within ten years, in a strategy that includes covering mobile data charges for those interacting with its brands.

Moreover clothes retailer Gap claimed in 2011 that its investment in mobile had helped the company treble its online conversions, citing its new mobile commerce platform, targeted mobile ads and a GPS-based store locator as the elements behind this surge.

Then there’s the automotive industry. Every week eBay sells more than 2,000 cars on mobile web and innovation is this sector is rampant. In some cases, QR codes have been used to take the customer from a brochure or TV to a test drive and AutoTrader recently reported that in 2011 45% of its customers had accessed AutoTrader Mobile while ON a dealer’s forecourt to research a car.

Significant dates have also pushed mobile web through the last 12 months. Mothers Day purchases of gifts and especially flowers have seen mobile become the platform of choice for many and the recent Thanksgiving Day celebrations in the US has seen a similar spike. Christmas, as already noted, will push mobile transactions via the mobile web to a new level.

Of course, there’s more to come. At Wapple we’re busy getting the message out to those businesses and brands that haven’t yet caught the wave. There are plenty more verticals still to bring their services to the mobile masses. Thankfully, with great technology platforms like ours it’s no longer the daunting task that it once was.

Acquisitions and mergers have also driven the market. The recent acquisition of Mobile Interactive Group by Velti and the  merger between iLoop Mobile and Lenco Mobile is testament to this. Expect further market consolidation in 2012.

But there are also grounds for caution and it might be propitious to return to Google for the numbers. Its 2011 study that only 21% of its biggest advertisers had a mobile-optimised web presence.

Google used 200 diagnostic points to measure each advertiser’s mobile readiness, with criteria such as load time, device detection and mobile optimisation, so this is an in-depth study.

There is still work to do. With at least 10% of web sites now accessed by mobile and rising daily, this state of play shows how important imobile strategy is. Sub-standard mobile experiences damage brands and send customers away. Companies, big and small alike, need to treat mobile with as much as respect as they do for all traditional channels. Perhaps even more so – after all this is the platform of the future, the platform that connects with consumers wherever they are.

Over the past 15 years the internet has made this process an absolute dream… and to think there was once a time when online shopping was regarded as a fad. Fortunately, Amazon has set the standard and when the Advent calendars start to open the company prepares itself for the deluge of demands and deliveries.

This year everyone is expecting an unprecedented increase in Christmas sales to be via mobile, and there will be! Figures figures just coming in from the US show that mobile sales this Black Friday vs 2010 are up 254% and PayPal experienced a 516 per-cent year-over-year increase in global mobile payment volume. Paypal are set to be one of the winners this Christmas, along with Amazon, but many other retailers will miss a golden opportunity.

I very recently moved house and whilst waiting for BT to come and establish my broadband connection (20 days to be precise – arrrggghh) I was depending on my mobile for Christmas Shopping. But after hours of trying to browse PC websites I eventually gave up and went to Amazon mobile, disgusted that my time had been wasted when I had so much else to do.

Amazon on mobile is relatively easy. There are some minor user frustrations BUT it works, holds my payment details and offers one-click checkout. This is not a difficult model to replicate or even improve on yet so many mobile lazy retailers continue to let their consumers down.

Perhaps when Amazon releases its mobile figures at the start of 2012 its competitors will realise the opportunity they missed. The mobile web isn’t going away… but if companies don’t get mobile friendly, their customers will.

Last week’s acquisition of Mobile Interactive Group by Velti and the recent merger between iLoop Mobile and Lenco Mobile is testament to this. The market is converging and consolidating as the mobile web matures and larger organisations realise that it is critical to their businesses to be part of this Latest Frontier.

We expect this consolidation to continue as smartphone use increases and the mobile web becomes an integral part of businesses’ strategy.

Back in the early days we visualised how the mobile web would evolve so it is a joy to continue contributing to the growth and to watch it come into fruition.

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.

We applaud Google’s initiative as it will encourage advertisers to raise their mobile game. Mobile ad networks serve billions of page views so this is a huge opportunity for their advertisers but often they waste this by linking their banner ad to their website, rather than a mobile optimised version.

We know from our research that a brand will see 80%+ bounce rate by serving their website to the mobile consumer so in essence each advertiser is simply burning their ad-spend unless they link the consumer to a mobile friendly experience. Mobile lazy brands are doing a disservice to the industry and, more importantly, to their consumers.

Google are a mobile friendly ad-network, as are Microsoft and Mocean Mobile whom we have teamed up with too.  We look forward to working with the rest of the mobile ad-networks to ensure they can maximise their advertisers’ spend.

We’re not just talking about the 40% of teenagers who own one, but also the 18% (up 50% on last year) of people over the age of 65 who have them. Add to that the 62% of young adult owners and this means that an entire audience now has smartphones that they’re using, amongst other things, to utilise the mobile web.

Any talk of reaching critical mass is now over, the mobile market has matured and is increasing at such a rate that mobile penetration and smartphone pentration will soon be exactly the same thing. So, as we’ve often said, the time is here for publishers and brands to offer integrated mobile web experiences for everybody.

It’s time to think teenager, think pensioner, think businessperson, think man, think woman, think everybody. Do that and this extraordinary market for mobile experiences will generate many new and exciting customer interactions.

Don’t do it and you may have missed the biggest business opportunity since the invention of the wheel.

What we loved: Looks nice and is consistent with Apple branding
What we’d love to see improved: Apple are currently only providing the desktop version of their website for their mobile consumers.  Let me repeat that.  Apple are currently only providing the desktop version of their website for their mobile consumers!!  This is bad form for any brand but Apple probably receive c.15% of their traffic from mobile users.  This is very bad for all the reasons we’ve discussed in other Mobile Friendly/Mobile Lazy posts.

The load size of their home page is nearly 400kb which makes for very frustrated consumers waiting for the page to load on mobile.   When it finally does load the consumer experiences the exasperation of zooming in for content and zooming out for context.  When they do zoom in they are then presented content that is completely irrelevant to their mobile needs. Additionally the videos they present on the homepage will not play on most mobile devices – including my mango-updated WP7.

With little analysis, it would probably take Apple marketers less than an hour to work out what their mobile web consumers want from them and then another hour to present an appropriate solution.  Apple make smartphones – they more than the majority of brands should understand mobile web.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of APPLE mobile is… and cast your vote below http://apple.com
Or see who else is Mobile Lazy

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