Going Mobile?

1st July 2011, by Andy Swinburne

Everything is now mobile, news, shopping, applications, email. Therefore and more importantly, your customers are mobile. 

Accessing websites on the move is rapid increasingly; mobile is forecast to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014 . Any business should be considering the opportunities this presents and the challenges involved. 

Going ‘Mobile’ is often seen as an accessory, nice-to-have or something to do in order to match competitors. However launching a mobile site or application is no easy task. 

Planned effectively with a clear goal, a mobile presence can add real value to your business and give great rewards to the end user. 

Target audience and their devices? 

Who are your mobile customers and what devices do they use? This is probably the most difficult question and one which can take some research. Short of doing extensive surveys and analysing statistics the alternative view is "Which devices and browsers will support my site the best for my customers". Targeting browsers and devices is a sea of combinations, which can lead to you attempting to cover all. Look at the standards and features they support, current market share and forecast growth for the device brand and browser. 

Also look at industry leading technologies, these provide a wealth of resource detailing much of the research which will be crucial to developing a mobile site. jQuery Mobile provide an excellent graded browser support matrix, which cross-references the platform with the browser and the support offered. This provides a valuable insight into which platforms give the best results and therefore should be targeted. 

Building a mobile site? 

Keep it simple! The key to mobile development and getting it right relies heavily on the design and architecture. More so than the actual development, some key considerations: 

• What would people on move be looking at – tailor the content accordingly E.g. contact details and map on the landing page
• Keep it light on imagery, slow loading pages on unstable and slow connection will cause customers to switch off (literally) – use W3C validator
• Cut out non-essentials E.g click through ads
• Always aim for the most direct route to any content
• Include a full site link - always give the choice of visiting the full site
• Make use of mobile features, if geolocaton will be of use then build it into the site 

Testing

Now comes the difficult part. While choosing targeted devices may have left you going round in circles, trying to test a mobile site can well do the same. Start small and look at the device and browser combinations from earlier. 

Testing on physical mobile devices is a must, there are many emulators available but physical testing is the only way to guarantee the look and (more so) feel of the website. 

Use a mobile testing company when starting out. Getting a host of devices in house is both costly and can become dated quickly, so why not have someone do it for you? There are several companies which specialise mobile testing, allowing you to test on multiple devices quickly and many even operate on a pay as you go basis. 

As with anything on the web you can’t test enough, however mobile has so many more variables that testing has never been so crucial. 

It’s an exciting and ever changing arena – start with a simple mobile version, use this to test out the concept and refine then model. Then continually enhance this and see where else mobile can take you.