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

What we loved: The site is optimised across a broad range of devices with consistent style. Simple navigation, good usability and clickable links, readable search results. In terms of functionality Argos ticks all the boxes.
What we’d love to see improved: Not all of the branding carries over from web to mobile – e.g. buttons. The store locator could be location-based e.g.”Nearest store to me now!” Perhaps additional location experiences such as location based promotions or local store updates.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of ARGOS mobile is and cast your vote below… http://argos.co.uk

1/10: Presented the PC website – site breaks/crashes the mobile browser so nothing displays

2 or 3/10: Presented the PC website – site takes too long to load and/or has key elements that are not supported by many devices. Mobile consumer compelled to leave

4: Presented the PC website – pages render on mobile device but the website does not present most relevant content for mobile users. Also zooming in for content and out for context is frustrating.

5/10: Redirected to a mobile site but the mobile experience is basic and the user experience poor which is not in line with digital branding of website. Lowest common denominator approach

6 or 7/10: Redirected to a great mobile site for smart phones but the experience is poor on older devices. And /or the content is not relevant for mobile users

8 or 9/10: Redirected to a great mobile site experience that accommodates consumers on the move no matter what device they have.

10/10: Served mobile relevant content from the website domain and underlying application with an experience catered for mobile users. The site is optimised for all mobile devices old and new. They included unique usability for the mobile customer eg instore experiences, scan QR codes or promotions, mobile campaigns.

While Nielsen’s focus groups are small, the message is plain. He says mobile web design has a long way to go and 100% customer satisfaction won’t come for another 15 years. That’s where we disagree with him. We can create rich mobile web experiences using tools that are strong on design and tailor-made for the platform; usability experience will come sooner than 2026.

Our clients and brands are demanding more from us as mobile web design evolves and we deliver quality for them. We are making a difference and one day we might even improve the frankly unweildy design of a certain website created by Jakob Neilsen.

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.

For anyone wanting to display a listing of their products, be it either a one off list, or a list of categories, or a list of items inside a category – it’s all now possible.

You’ve got a load of options to play with:- display thumbnails next to product titles; upload separate thumbnails for each category; options for pagination and of course as with everything in Wapple Canvas, it’s fully multi-lingual.

Right now the shop chunk allows you to show your products, but we have plans for adding checkouts and to integrate with mobile payment providers such as PayPal mobile express checkout. When we add these, we’ll make sure we let you know.

We’ve already used the shop chunk to display product listings on a number of sites – it’s great for showing information and allowing your consumers to browse through items.

Get in touch and let us know what you think of our new feature or if you’ve tried it and have a suggestion to improve it!

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!

I’ve written a much more in-depth article over there about how we did it, but here’s a bite-sized version that you can cut out and put in your wallet:

1. Install the Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin
2. Grab a free dev key from http://wapple.net/register/plugins-signup.htm
3. Activate the plugin and enter your dev key in the Basic settings area
4. Upload a mobile logo
5. Tailor settings so that the mobile version matches the web
6. Style the mobile version so that you retain your brand identity

If you want to read the full article, you can check it out here.

And finally, here is a screenshot of the mobile and web site that shows you how good your mobile blog can look!

Last month we published a new mobile plugin to the wordpress.org plugin repository called WordPress Mobile Admin. It won’t surprise you to hear that it does exactly what it says on the tin and mobilizes your WordPress control panel.

Prior to creating the plugin, we canvased a number of power mobile bloggers and asked their opinions on what features would be useful in a mobile plugin. We didn’t want to completely re-create the WP dashboard on mobile, but rather create a dashboard with features that would only be appropriate whilst you’re using your handset.

Top Features

It became pretty obvious that creating posts, being able to upload photos and moderate comments were the most popular requests, so they were installed as the top priorities and implemented pretty much straight away. Another top priority was to make the mobile dashboard look and feel like the web dashboard as much as possible as we wanted to keep the user experience as consistent as possible. The theory being that if you’ve used the WordPress control panel on web, you should know where everything is on mobile without having to look around too much.

And with those tasks done, the plugin was released. Job done – well, almost..

Upgrades and downgrades

As with any software, there are plenty of bug reports, feature requests and performance upgrades that all require implementing – so after collating them all, they were entered into Trac, were prioritised and worked on.

One of the most interesting feature requests that came in was for the mobile plugin to work on PHP4. We’ve always made it a requirement in our plugins (not just wordpress) that you had to have SimpleXML and as this came as standard with PHP5 – you needed this too. But we found an awesome class on phpclasses.org called SimpleXML for PHP4 by Taha Paksu, that with a little tweaking, did the same job as the native SimpleXML functions.

By wrapping the class creation in a function called “simplexml_load_string” (and wrapping that inside a if !function_exists(‘simplexml_load_string’)), we’d got SimpleXML functionality with PHP4 – result!

In addition to this, we’ve added features so you can manage your tags and categories on mobile as well as create tags inside posts – all in the same way you’d do on web. We’ve also replicated the admin colour scheme switcher so if you prefer the Blue theme to Gray, you can display that on your phone!

Cutting to the chase – here is the list of features and new functionality that have been bundled into version 2.0.

New Feature list

• Removed dependancy on simpleXML – now works with PHP4
• Footer now present on Login page – frames page nicely
• Added edit post tags page
• Added delete/add post tags
• Added edit categories page
• Added delete/add categories
• Added customized colour schemes
• Added ability to edit tags when adding/editing a post
• Bug fix: Show correct number of posts on edit posts page
• Bug fix: Fixed pingbacks on comments page

No more dependancies

What this means is that we’ve been able to completely remove the “Things you must have..” section in the readme file for WordPress Mobile Admin. All dependancies have been removed and another barrier to mobile has been removed! We’re going to be rolling out the same PHP4 upgrades across all of our other plugins – keep an eye out for those if you’ve been waiting for that feature!

If you want to check out the new version of WordPress Mobile Admin for yourself, head over to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-admin/ and download it. Alternatively, if you search for “wordpress mobile admin wapple” in the Add New Plugin section on your own WordPress control panel, you can install it automatically.

If there are any other features you’d like to see in the next version, leave a comment and let us know!

Overcoming the barriers of mobile web design and development – it’s the tagline of our blog and something that we strive towards each and every day.

We’ve given the development community some amazing tools that allow you to create some fantastic mobile sites and we’ve created plugins, components and classes that help you at every step.

But one thing every Wapple Architect application has in common, is that in order to use it, it must be done via SOAP.

Or should I say, used to have in common, because this week we’ve created and released a REST web service for every SOAP call you can make.

Using Wapple Architect with CURL

What this means as a developer is that you can choose whichever method you want to communicate with Wapple Architect. If you want to use SOAP, carry on doing what you’ve always done, but if you want to use REST, use it. And to show how easy that can be, here’s how you would check if a visitor to your site is mobile or not using PHP and CURL:

<?php
$headers = '';
foreach($_SERVER as $key => $val)
{
 $headers .= $key.':'.$val.'|';
}
$postfields = array(
 'devKey' => 'YOUR_DEV_KEY',
 'headers' => $headers
);
$c = curl_init();
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://webservices.wapple.net/isMobileDevice.php');
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postfields);
curl_setopt($c, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($c);
curl_close($c);
if($result)
{
 // We're a mobile device! Generate some WAPL and use getMarkupFromWapl.php service!
} else
{
 // Not a mobile device - generate HTML and output to screen.
}
?>

Once you’ve established that your visitor is a mobile visitor, you can use the getMarkupFromUrl.php or getMarkupFromWapl.php services and amend your $postfields array to include the ‘url’ or ‘wapl’ keys respectively.

Architect with SOAP or REST

So if you’ve looked at using Wapple Architect before but for one reason or another couldn’t or wouldn’t install SOAP, you’ve now got another option that allows you to mobilize your site or app!

We’ve already integrated these new services into our Wapple Architect Mobile Plugin for WordPress so that if you don’t have SOAP installed on your server, you automatically fall back to using REST. And lets face it, if you’re on a shared host, getting SOAP installed is not a task to be taken lightly and can be tricky.

What do you think of these new REST services, does it mean you’ll use Wapple Architect? Do we need even more coverage of web services – XMLRPC for example? Get in touch and let us know!