We have an internal system for displaying mobile sites that have been built by our developers and customers using Canvas and Architect. Because there are literally thousands and thousands of these sites we have developed a cool mechanism to highlight those that have been completed and published.

For 8 years we have been living and breathing mobile web here at Wapple and our greatest passion is to empower our designer and developer base to become successful using the Wapple mobile build and publishing platform; the same platform we use internally to develop some of biggest brand sites in the world.

And this is why I was SO overjoyed when a huge percentage of the sites that were showing on our internal display were utterly world-class. Sites that we at Wapple would be proud of if we had produced them ourselves.

The Wapple platform I am talking about is not a template site builder or a screen-scraping solution so the thousands of sites that are appearing on our display really ARE the best in class (we have a separate product to cater for SMEs that requires less skill but still produces best results) and we can proudly say that people who take the time to learn to use Canvas and Architect and who use our community, tutorials and best-practice guides REALLY ARE the best Mobile Web Developers and Designers in the world today.

Soon we will showcase these designers and developers on our website and through our social channels and the guys that receive the greatest ratings will be invited to become part of our pending accredited program. Watch this space!

If you are a Wapple platform developer and would like us to review your own sites please submit your URLS for review inside the Community or email to community@wapple.net

In the meantime, here are some awesome examples from the likes of Flood Light Studios, Maciv Ltd, Creel Printing Ltd, Syntagm and Keys Innovation Solutions amongst others. LIKE and Comment on these great designs on Facebook

Our tech-savvy participants reported carrying out a wide range of activities on mobile web from shopping, banking and watching videos but predominantly to access emails, socialise or for information, maps and directions.

We asked what would improve the experince of the mobile web and almost all cited the need for mobile-friendly sites or raised issues of usabilty, design, speed and accessibility; which would predominantly be addressed if brands presented mobile optimised sites. ‘Other’ included ideas for offline mode, cloud storage and improved security.

We saw earlier that 85% accessed the mobile web via Smart phones showing people are accessing the web via mobile devices but, as their experience shows, the mobile sites are not delivering the quality of user experience the phones and technology could and that consumers are asking for.

For business to serve consumers better, efforts must be put into delivering quality usable interactive mobile optimised sites that are easily accessible by all regardless of device. We continue to see the percentages of online traffic via mobile increase, but it is increasing more slowly than it could, not because consumers aren’t using it but because businesses haven’t yet tailored a high-quality mobile-friendly experience for them.

This week Forrester Research published that mobile is the “new face of engagement that is here to stay and just as the internet made us take a long hard look at how we structured IT, so too does Mobile.  Smartphone ownership is already nearing 1 billion, meaning your customers will be looking for you via their mobiles, are you ready?

The Gomometer is a great starting point where you can easily test whether you are mobile ready. Simply enter your website URL and it’ll check the configuration and loading speeds to determine whether your consumers are having a great or poor time. Although we were 100% confident our site was mobile-friendly we ran it through the Gomometer to see the results! As expected our site loads quickly in 0.97 seconds and we passed all the mobile-friendly tests!

As we’ve talked about before, a mobile friendly site is designed for smaller screen but without compromising quality or experience. Content needs to be visible, readable and usable. A mobile site should interact with a consumer for their unique device and provide mobile-specific opportunities such as location-based offerings. Interaction must be simple, easy with few thumb size clicks and contact numbers should display as click-to-call.

See how friendly your site is and find out how to Go Mobile

68% responded that a tablet would be the device they would most like to own next and given that in yesterdays results the tablet is seen by 70% to be a mobile device this opens up numerous opportunities, as well as barriers, for brands presenting content to multiple platforms across the web. The numbers of respondents wishing for a Tablet as opposed to other devices may simply represent that smartphone penetration and pc ownership are still far greater than the Tablet. “Other” in the below chart includes Smart Tv and future inventions!

When asked which Smartphone respondents most wanted to own next, the iPhone took a staggering 50% of votes. The other half of responses were spread fairly evenly between Android and Windows platforms with 13% still undecided and Blackberry scaping a tiny 2%. Given other reports of huge Android growth we’d expected to see it cutting into the iPhone share but as these numbers reflect peoples wishes not actual commitment to purchase, and a common comment regarding smartphone choice was that it would ultimately be one they could afford it could be where iPhone physically lose out. This is good news however for Windows with people clearly recognising the potential of WP7.

As highlighted yesterday this survey was distributed across a tech-savvy group so not entirely representative of the mass populous! Tomi Ahonen released figures today on World SmartPhone Final Numbers 2011 showing actual sales from last year giving Apple a market share of just short of 20%.

Tomorrow we’ll look at what you use it for and how to improve the Mobile Web …

91% of respondents reported accessing the web via some sort of mobile phone, 85%  via smartphones and 7% from feature phones, almost all respondents are using a phone to access the mobile web for a variety of activities. Tablet usage to access the web came in much lower however this may be down to penetration, almost everyone has some sort of mobile but not everyone has a tablet. In the below chart “other” consists of smart TVs and games consoles.

We also looked at what devices respondents considered as mobile. The term originally comes as an abbreviation of mobile phone but with an increasing array of devices of varying sizes and abilities, where does mobile begin and end? Almost 70% consider a tablet as a mobile device with netbooks still being viewed by a similar amount as being nearer to a desktop than a mobile.

Next results: what devices and smartphones are on everyones wishlists…

Mobile is a Channel in its own right, not simply an extension of the web, and whilst the noise about it is increasing so is the confusion. We are hearing more decision makers voice that they want to go mobile but they simply don’t know where to begin. Retailers are being quickest to pick up the mobile baton with 33% currently offering some form of mobile interaction juxtaposed to just 17% of all UK business.

Rather than tacking a mobile solution onto the end of a digital marketing campaign, prioritise it. Put it first. Spend some time identifying how your consumers want to interact with you via mobile. Look at the web stats you already have and analyse where your mobile visitors are trying to visit on your website (and likely failing). Put yourself in a mobile-mindset, what isn’t PC offering, what is unique about mobile, what does a mobile consumer need or want and how can you best reach them?

Mobile thinking now needs to be injected into every digital decision whether its your pc-based web site, digital marketing campaigns, advertising, commerce or social media. To neglect this increasingly important channel is to neglect an ever increasing population and therefore effectively close the door to increased business opportunities. Your consumers are mobile and they are waiting for you, but they wont wait forever.

Still need some more guidance? Use the tools available at the howtogomo.com initiative or drop us a line here at Wapple to chat about mobile for you.

“Anne Thomas explains the business benefits of taking the trouble to make sure your website is truly mobile-friendly

I recently looked over a Dotmobi study that determined that in 2010, 19.3 per cent of the top 500,000 websites were mobile-friendly.  This seemed an unfeasibly high percentage and didn’t chime at all with my experience – so I replicated the study with a 2011 twist.

I used Alexa to study the top half-million websites, as Dotmobi had, and investigated what percentage had a mobile-friendly version when hitting the web URL.  I came up with a figure of 8.1 per cent – so it’s abundantly clear that Dotmobi and i have a very different idea of what “mobile-friendly” means.

I classified any experience as “mobile-friendly” if I was redirected to a mobile site under a subdomain or served mobile-formatted and design content from the main website.  I excluded any experience where I was simply served the website that was designed for PC consumption.  It’s not mobile-friendly to disregard the needs of the mobile consumer: it’s mobile-lazy.

Unhappy Customers
This is a serious matter – many brands that Wapple has worked with typically see an 85 per cent bounce-rate on their website from mobile devices until they present optimised content for all mobile devices using our technology.  So, for example, if they generate 200,000 unique hits in a month, this is around17,000 unhappy customers (based on an assumption that 10 per cent of traffic is from mobile devices.)

My data does of course forgive all the ill-conceived WAP landing pages and mobile user experiences and credits these brands for at least trying to present something to mobile browsers, including them in my figures.  However, I believe that a true mobile-friendly website should present the same branding but in a way that is designed for small-screen display and browsing.  It should take into account the mobility of the consumer and present only relevant information and content from the website for their “in-situ” needs.  It should also interact with them for their unique device and provide mobile-specific opportunities such as location-based offerings.  Interaction should be simple to understand with few clicks, forms ought ot be low maintenance and contact numbers should display as click-to-call.

I’ve recently published a number of examples of both mobile-friendly and mobile-lazy websites, including some exemplary experiences that were served to my mobile browser from their respective websites’ (.com .net and so on) domains.  I’ve scored each of these examples out of 10.  One of the finest specimens of a mobile-friendly site is Ameba, a Japanese entertainment news and information portal.

“Mobile site interaction should be simple to understand with few clicks”

Even after including poor mobile experiences in the “mobile-friendly” mix, the outcome of of my analysis was very different to Dotmobi’s – so I concluded that Dotmobi’s percentages must have included PD designed websites that render on smartphone browsers, whereas I would classify those ones as being”mobile-lazy”.  This theory was strengthened when I viewed Dotmobi’s own website on my mobile browser (dotmobi.com or dotmobi.mobi) – I would have scored this 5/10 using my personal scoring system.

The Real Deal
Mobile web awareness is increasing and a growing number of businesses and brands are looking for a true mobile web experience to serve to their mobile audience.  A lot of them are completely dumping the idea of depending on native apps for mobile consumers.

Additionally recent initiatives such as Google GoMo and mOcean Mobile’s Publisher Annex will work to educate and strengthen marketers’ understanding of the mobile web and how it will benefit their business.  Hopefully we’ll be seeing a big increase in the number of truly mobile-friendly sites over this coming year.”

published in .netmagazine p127 Issue 224

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!

Many brands heeded the go-mobile call and attempted to ensure some form of mobile presence in time for the festive season with some doing it well and other’s still low on the learning curve. This move has been a wise one and shows they recognise the growing importance of their mobile consumers, especially in the retail industry.

Some mobile sites delivered exactly what their customers wanted whilst others are struggled to get it right. Common oversights have been; not including location map or store finder and in some cases product lists. Click to call links have also been commonly missed and yes there are still the slow burners trying to force an entire desktop site onto a small screen!

Despite some fails, IBM reported the much expected increase in online traffic from mobile devices. On Christmas and Boxing Day 18.3% of all online traffic came via a mobile device and 14.4% of all actual purchases were made via mobile. Earlier predictions that 2012 would see mobile traffic hit 20% look set to be surpassed.

It is important to understand thatthis data reflects mobile web consumption is growing as a whole and is not just a Christmas fad. According to research by Barclay’s Corporate late last year, 52% of consumers are already using mobile devices at one or more stages of the shopping process. It is conceivable that with the growing trust in mCommerce and more brands releasing fully functional mobile commerce sites that this 52% could willingly and easily utilise mobile for the entire shopping process.

So what do all these percentages and traffic mean in terms of sales? Joshua Bamfield, director of the Centre for Retail Research in Great Britain, believes that mobile Christmas shopping in the UK totaled about $2 billion, that’s £1.3billion!

Those who didn’t implement a mobile strategy in time for the festive season not only missed their share of these sales but may also miss out on future sales as consumers offer their loyalty to brands who delivered them a merry mobile Christmas.

If you’d like to discuss your Mobile Strategy we’d love to hear from you.