We’ve created a fantastic 10 Session Webinar Training Program to aid you in becoming a master mobile web design expert and we’re including an additional 11th session focusing on mobile marketing.

This webinar-based Program starts November 1st and is absolutely FREE and we’re offering it exclusively to registered Wapple users. (not registered yet…click here quick!)

During the course you will learn how to build a mobile site yourself using our fictitous car services site ‘K-Ching’ as the focal point whilst learning some of the exciting key design, marketing & technical features of our intelligent Mobile Publishing Platform.

Once registered you’ll be able to download the Training Pack which will include the Program Schedule, the K-Ching Mobile Site content (graphics, csvs ) and all relevant training preperation.

Be quick though, places are limited and registration closes THIS Friday 28th October.

Register Now for the K-Ching Training Webinar! (or sign up with Wapple first)

Some are more ahead of the curve than others. In its recent campaign for its new S60 car, VW used the AdMob platform to target smartphone owners with banners ads and interactive video ads. Here at Wapple we have built sites for many car brands such as Ford, Alfa, Landrover, Nissan and Honda as well as a number of banner campaigns to run on major ad networks.

Great mobile site for Nissan - built by Wapple

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 January this year 45% of its customers had accessed AutoTrader Mobile while ON a dealer’s forecourt to research a car.

Moreover a recent blog from a Google mobile advertising specialist said that more than 13 million people (in the US) will buy a car this year and that they will be engaging with their mobile to do so.

Consequently all companies in the car industry should not just treat mobile merely as a test drive, but more like a fully integrated transport system where the mobile route is as bump-free as all other retail channels. Don’t be a crash test dummy, mobilise that web site now!

One option is to design it with CSS – add a border here, a background there, and you’ll get something that looks a little bit like a button. Take advantage of some CSS3 features such as border-radius and maybe a gradient background and you can come up with something really nice.

But what happens on phones that don’t handle CSS3 (or CSS in general) that well? You’ll get a rubbish looking button, that’s what !!

Another option with CSS, is to create an image, and reference it with via a background CSS property. But you’ll have the same issue as above – some phones will display it ok, but some won’t.

So to try and help with this, we’ve added a new form item – Image submit. You’ve had image submit buttons in HTML for ages and now we’ve added this feature to both Canvas and Architect.

In Canvas, you simply create a new form item of type “Image Submit Button”, and assign it a graphic you’ve already uploaded. No relying on CSS and if a handset can’t handle it, we’ve got a fallback in place.

In Architect, create a <formItem> element, and specify a “graphic_src” element – the system will use this URL as the basis of the image. If you don’t want it to scale, set the graphic_scale to 0 – check out our formItem documentation for a more in depth analysis.

Let us know if this new feature helps you out and send through the URL of your site so we can take a look at your new submit buttons!

So if someone hits your site but ends up on a URL they shouldn’t, you can now create a handy 404 page that might have links to your sitemap (or even a Sitemap chunk on it), a link to the home page, or anything you want.

You can edit your 404 page exactly the same way as you do any other page on your site – create some text, drop a graphic or two on it and you’re done.

If you want some inspiration for cool looking 404 pages, check out this link: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/60-really-cool-and-creative-error-404-pages/ – there are some great 404 pages on there and if you create something similar, let us know and we’ll publish some of the best!

Well all these problems and more have been solved with the latest chunk to be added to Wapple Canvas.

It’s called the Bing Search Near Me chunk and is an integration with a number of technologies from those clever folk at Bing. It allows you to search for locations near to you – pizzas, restaurants, golf clubs, fitness centers – they’re all there ready to be searched for.

Lots of Bing

First of all, it integrates with the Bing Maps Search Service, which allows you to enter a location and keyword – and return relevant results. Tie it in with GPS lookups on a mobile phone browser and you’ve got something that will find you stuff right where you are!

We’ve also integrated the chunk with Bing Maps, so not only can you find locations near you, but you can see where they are on a map – very useful if you’re not too familiar with an area.

And finally we’ve used the Bing Maps Direction Service, so after seeing your nearby spots on a nice looking map, you get handy directions that show you exactly how to get there and how long it’ll take!

Some practical uses

If you want any kind of search on your site to find businesses, or shops, or restaurants or whatever, this is the chunk for you. It’s massively configurable, so if you want to allow your users the ability to click the link to phone the shop direct, or change walking to driving directions, you can.

It also has a setting for overriding the mode it starts in – so if you have an event and want to show the nearest 3 Sushi restaurants to your party in downtown Manhattan, set the mode override, specify the where and the what and let the chunk do the rest!

To demonstrate just how useful this chunk is – we had a guy at Wapple HQ needing to find a tyre in a hurry. He used the Bing Search Near Me chunk to find a tyre shop nearby, used the click to call functionality to check if they had one in stock, and followed the directions and map to get there to have his tyre fitted!

It’s all available in one chunk inside of Canvas – so log on and add a Bing Search Near Me chunk to your page to get your users looking for locations near them!

If you’ve got some ideas for using the chunk and would like to talk them through with us, drop us a line.

Store locators, POI locators, Location Lookups – call them what you want – we’ve integrated them into Canvas so you can have location based services built into your mobile site.

The system is two fold.

Geo caching

First up, you create your locations (either manually or with a CSV file) – you don’t need to know exactly where they are either, a zip or postcode will do. We’ll then use geocaching techniques to work the rest out including an exact latitude and longitude. We use a mixture of Bing, Google, Yahoo and Multimap for that but it’s configurable, so if you find your locations in your area are more accurate with Bing, then use Bing.

Location Lookup Chunk & Maps

Once that’s done – place a Location Lookup chunk on a page, specify which location group to grab data from and you’re done!

You get a whole raft of options with the chunk, ranging from which map provider you want to use (Google Maps so far – but more to come), to the colour of the marker/pushpin you want to use to show locations.

We’ve also employed some new techniques and technology with this chunk -  if you have a handset with a browser that supports GPS capabilities, the chunk can automatically find your location. Particularly handy if you don’t know where you are and need to find a coffee shop in a hurry!

Also, if you have an iPhone, you can click on the map and it’ll automatically open up Google Maps, again very useful if you want to pan and zoom. Of course if you don’t have an iPhone, you’ll still get a great looking map with all the locations mapped on it.

Store locators are the obvious and probably the most widely used application for this functionality, but you don’t have to restrict yourself to just that – surf spots and locations of music events are two others that spring immediately to mind. You could get really creative and track vehicles/people, and then allow visitors to your mobile site the ability to find them. Who knows, you could even create some sort of city based spy game with it!

If you’ve already created a store locator or any kind of location based service – or would like more information about how to get started, get in touch, we’d be only too glad to talk to you about it.

You’ll need an Amobee account, so for more information about Amobee and to sign up, check out http://www.amobee.com/main/hp.htm

It seems to have attracted a lot of flames. Blimey! Time for Mobile Web Junkie to dive in…

Read the  article. It’s great.

If you’re trying to make money, dump your iPhone strategy

Then the comments but in case you feel too much pain before you get as far as my comment, here it is, just for you:

Wow, what a lot of hate in the comments. I really think that a lot of you need to read back what you’ve written and see if it’s truly in the spirit of constructive debate.

I would suggest that every single flame has been posted by iPhone owners. A trait I’ve noticed is that as soon as someone jumps onto the Apple train they feel they have a fight on their hands. I guess it’s a complex caused by Microsoft constantly trumping Apple in the OS battle.

Let’s all calm down a little. There really is no need for all this flaming.

I don’t like the iPhone but I do recognise that it has done wonders for educating the public that there’s more to mobiles than just voice and text. Finally we have a platform that can do so much more, but importantly it makes extra applications accessible and consumable.

My problem is that the worldwide market share that Apple has is actually a lot smaller than iPhone fans would have you believe. Given the amount of absolute trash that is available on the App Store I find it difficult to believe that enough people make money out of selling apps to maintain a sustainable environment.

This problem is not just Apple’s. I recently switched from Nokia to Android and I am inundated with rubbish and duplicate applications in the Marketplace and I am overwhelmed to the point that I cannot discern good from bad. It has become painful to find applications because of the distinct lack of editorial to filter the stuff that matters from that which doesn’t.

I am a mobile web expert – developing and delivering services for mobile web for the last 7 years at Wapple. I believe in the broadest possible publishing models and I believe in open markets not manufacturer-owned distribution channels.

The mobile web unifies all operating systems. Mobile web is the platform that we should all be publishing for as it is unrestricted and platform independent (provided you use the correct tools to overcome device variations).

A colleague of mine was a complete Apple head. He spent a lot of money on the App Store – then he had his phone stolen during a night out. Disgusted with O2′s refusal to honour the insurance policy he had paid for he bought himself a new Nokia, swearing never to return to iPhone again.

He lost all his apps. Those that he had paid for.

More worryingly for everyone in this forum, he was lost as a customer to those businesses relying on his ongoing custom through the App Store.

Though all the services that he engaged with through his mobile web browser were maintained as he moved to a new operating system.

Now the theft of a phone is an extreme example, although we can all relate I’m sure. But let’s look at our own histories. I am a Windows PC user and have been for 16 years. Sure I’ve used other operating systems fleetingly but I have worked with the same software and service vendors for years.

But when it comes to phones, I have used many different models from different manufacturers. Every 18 months for the last 10 years I have changed models and manufacturers.

I find it hard to believe that anyone will be an iPhone user for life. Right now iPhone is the ‘big thing’. All the decision makers have them (what about all the customers, though?). But it will not be the big thing forever.

Users will migrate. You will migrate. Then all the development and marketing you have put into attracting a small slice of the entire mobile audience will be for nothing.

Personally, I’ll keep developing for mobile web. It’s not a direct competitor to mobile apps anyway, but I do know that what I make will move with me, my customers and the market through all its twists, turns and trends.

Built with Canvas

Built with Architect

Since its conception a number of months ago, we’ve been telling anyone who will listen how good Architect is, how you can use one domain, use the same URLs on mobile as on web, retain SEO from web to mobile and centralize all underlying business logic no matter which platform you are browsing on.

Now we’re practicing what we preach

The previous site was built with Wapple Canvas, a superb tool with full drag and drop functionality perfect for creating mobile marketing campaigns. There are some awesome mobile sites built with Canvas that look amazing and convey the exact message they’re designed for, here are just a couple of them:

Watchmen

Alfa Mito

The above sites work better in Canvas as they’re designed specifically for mobile advertising campaigns, there’s no corresponding website and they can be targetted at a mobile audience. You’ll find more detail on Wapple Canvas here.

One domain

For websites like Wapple’s, it’s essential that if you’re on a mobile device and hit the wesite url (http://wapple.net in this case), you get something that looks perfect on your handset no matter what screensize or capabilities your phone may or may not have. It is essential to use Architect to deliver the mobile site with pages written in WAPL if you want to provide a great user experience to everyone.

During the week I read a tweet from Brian Fling about a one-day mobile workshop, and in the spirit of “if you can do it so can we”, we thought we’d have a go at building wapple.net with Architect & WAPL in one day.

We already had a mobile site built in Canvas with all graphics already saved out and we’d used our experience on mobile to make intelligent decisions over what was to be displayed on mobile rather than the website. For example, the big slider the sprawls across the home page of the website could be turned into a smaller and simpler version for smartphones such as the iPhone but wouldn’t really be appropriate for a tiny phone with no javascript capability.

This is where the magic happens

Mobile Shopping Review

The Wapple website is built with CakePHP, an MVC framework that gives us flexibility and speed of development. We’d previously mobilized plenty of other cake apps such as mobileshoppingreview.com plus I’d already written a plugin and article for the cake community about how to mobilize a cake app which, incidentally, we used to mobilize wapl.info. Development was going to be easier with the plugin already available :-

Once the Cake plugin was in place, it was just a case of writing WAPL for every page we wanted to mobilize.

Within half an hour we had the component in place that did device detection and altered the view and layout path accordingly if the visitor is on mobile, a layout that would take the WAPL code inside the view files, wrap it in a bit of header and footer WAPL and send it through a SOAP web service, and placeholder view files for the pages we wanted to mobilize.

Another half an hour and all of the ready made graphics were in place, the header and footer of the mobile site looked smart, the main menu was sorted (which actually looked better than the Canvas version) and we’d implemented a new bit of functionality that displayed the latest wapldevs tweet. And because we’re using cake and all business logic is centralized, latest tweets from wapplemobileweb are also available on the website!

After a quick break for lunch, a game of pool and a much needed cup of tea, we pressed on with creating view files for the pages. The home page was sorted first, shortly followed by the rest of the top level menu, the other product pages and lastly the contact form and latest news. By mid afternoon we were ready to send the site to QA for testing.

We noticed at this point that the quality of the images generated through Architect didn’t match that in Canvas. A short investigation ensued which resulted in a quick fix going up to the live WAPL server which fixed all of the image quality issues. After another short round of testing, the code came back with zero bugs so we were ready to launch.

Or so we thought

When deploying the code to a test live box, a number of elements on the website were being displayed twice or in some cases, three times and seeing as some of these elements were only referenced once in the code, it was a little confusing (it worked fine on the local dev server). The problem was an issue with cakephp, rsync and windows / linux file formatting and after running a touch command over all .php and .ctp files it resolved itself, however, this little setback meant we were near to 5.30pm and no-one wants to deploy anywhere near going home time.

We did build the site in a day

We did build the site in a day and although it would have been nice to launch on the same day, common sense meant it was launched first thing the next morning, however, it does prove how quick and easy it is to mobilize a website. We now have URLs that work both on mobile and web, we’re using just 1 domain for every browsing platform and we’re retaining all of our website SEO giving us the ability to promote our sole domain and not resort to m. or /mobile or a .mobi.

We’d been seeking a solution for a long time that will mobilize existing web content so it was a really significant step for us to employ Architect as the technology behind our mobile wesite. Inventing WAPL was very much an epoch defining moment in Wapple’s history!

So in summary

Developing properly for mobile is now an easy process, especially if you’re using a framework that does all of the heavy lifting for you. Gone are all the barriers for web developers which I’ve written about in my intro to architect article – you should be able to mobilize an entire site in a single day with Architect.

To see how we got on and view the site on your mobile, visit wapple.net or scan the QR code to take you directly to the site.

If you want to make a truly mobile friendly version of your own website just like we did, sign up to our Developer program for free usage and a dev key.