What the site needs to do is know that the user is coming from a mobile device by detecting the device. Then, the site needs to serve up the appropriate page under m.site.com to the user, thus not making the user have to think. Obviously, the site also needs to:

1) Make Relevant information easy to find – spend resources on ease of navigation
2) Keep Content To A Minimum
3) Make a Familiar and Non-Threatening Path to the Information
4) The Information Must Appear Correctly the First Time
5) And Lastly, Test, Test and Re-test! (Use a full lab of mobile devices to see what your customers are seeing!)

And I must admit, something I hadn’t even thought about.

Nice work.

Take a global brand, someone like Pepsi. They’ve built themselves up by being locale specific with regards to their promotions, and websites etc. – if I’m French, i’d go to http://ww.pepsi.fr/, if i’m Dutch, http://www.pepsi.nl/ and so on.

How are they supposed to accomplish this with .mobi? Is it http://fr.pepsi.mobi/?

http://m.pepsi.fr/ is far more intuitive, works with the exising TLD infrastructure, and costs no additional money for the registrant. So why anyone would even think of using .mobi is beyond me.

Nice response.

James, I have to take issue with your statement – Vodafone users *do* have a choice.

The first time a Vodafone customer tries to access the web, they get asked “do you want Vodafone to adapt pages to better suit your phone?”

The user can, at any time (even as they’re browsing a page) change their transcoding preferences. If the transcoder is screwing up a page, there’s a link at the bottom of the page saying “See Original” or “Unmodified” I forget which.

They can also go to Web Preferences on Vodafone live and permanently change the transcoding options.

The transcoder doesn’t alter mobile friendly pages. Anything on an m. server, .mobi domain, valid xhtml-mp, https sites regulated by the FSA or on a whitelist remain unchanged.

Finally, the user can use a different APN – internet – granted a bit technical for a “normob”.

I think that’s a fair bit of choice. It certainly means that anyone with a crappy old phone on GPRS can visit a lot more websites than they used to.

However, this doesn’t change the fact that transcoding can only ever be a stop-gap solution. One day we’ll all be on UMTS running Webkit / Firefox / Opera. We’ll have lasers beaming 22 inch images directly into our eyeballs. Everyone will be writing valid XHTML / HTML 5.

Until that day, people can access WAP sites, they can access mobile friendly sites, they can access “full fat” sites and, if they choose, have them shrunk to work on their phone.

Blimey, that’s a lot of text to type onto a Blackberry!

Great reading, all of them.

Something I want to pick up on that Dan said:

“…until a single universal standard emerges (and that will be chosen by the end user, NOT a governing body or company)…”

This worries me slightly. How could the user possibly choose if the user isn’t given the choice?
In this instance: A Vodafone user.

And that’s a mobile site. Excellent post, Ewan.

ok, its true that some of these devices still have some issues but they are far removed from the 2″ experience. The argument remains, there are many mobile internet devices (and there will be many more) that present the web in its intended format.

Zteve

I’m willing to argue that. I’ve found that browsing the “normal web” on an iPhone is a horrible experience. If you load a page of any decent length, it slows to a crawl. Scrolling becomes VERY unresponsive (it can sometimes take up to 10 seconds for each scroll to take effect on TechCrunch), and when it eventually does scroll you’re shown a transparent style page until the device can render the new area (this can take another 5-10 seconds).

2″ mobile web is what you’re talking about and yes, WRT that, you’re right. Forget re-renderers. m. is also a great way to go. No web master wants to have to buy and maintain another domain.

My feeling is that PMPs and MIDs will merg into one device for the 4+ mobile experience (video+internet.) If its done correctly (read: style, ease of use) then we might see many peoples iPods grow into iPads over the next 2 years.

Steve.

People do want easy to access, mobile specific services – and this is exactly what transcoding engines seek to do. They are, at the moment, imperfect. But in the absence of mobile friendly content, what option is there for those of us without N95s or iPhones?

I agree that .mobi is harder to type than m., but in a world where people have become conditioned to look at TLDs for content (.info, .museum, .uk) it makes it a more memorable focal point than “m.”.

All that being said, content is king. A site like http://traintimes.org.uk/ is not mobile friendly but the content is better than http://nationalrail.co.uk/mobile – IMO. People go where the content and usability appeal to them and don’t care whether it’s mobile friendly, transcoded or used a handheld specific CSS.

I’m sure that Vodafone (and the other operators) will be publishing statistics in the new year – but suffice to say, I don’t think any of them are regretting going down the transcoded route. If you survey customers they love internet access and most of them appreciate having “desktop” websites down-scaled to their mobile screen. Those that don’t like transcoding can, and do, turn it off.

I’d encourage people to look at the debate on Betavine – http://www.vodafonebetavine.net/web/guest/forums/message_boards/category/182 – if they’re interested in the realities of transcoding rather than the hyperbole.

You can visit my new ajax heavy site at m.wap.mobi/mobile

Terence

The techie in me wants to examine the structure of a basic URL as originally intended by bearded folk:

http://www.smstextnews.com

http: the transport method, in this case, HyperText Transport Protocol
www: Hostname, in this case we can see that this is a World Wide Web server if this were primarily an FTP site it’d probably have the hostname “ftp”, a news site? it’d be “news” or “nntp”…. you get the idea.
smstextnews: Domain Name, a unique identifier in it’s TLD namespace.
com: Top Level Domain, originally .com domains were used to signify a US or international commercial entity, many country TLDs have a second level such as .uk which contains .co.uk, .org.uk … come on, you all know this right?

Now, the techie will generally ignore what’s best for the end user and recent trends in mis-naming things and concentrate on what is TECHNICALLY the correct place to specify a Mobile site.

Do we replace HTTP with MOBI? no… because we’re still using HTTP to transfer the data.

So do we replace the hostname part?… tricky one this, originally we’d use this to specify what the server did (in the days before virtualhosts) but nowadays it’s used for allsorts. Keeping things strictly traditional… no, we wouldn’t change this because we’re still essentially a webserver.

Nobody would really think of using a mobile-specific domain (www.smstextnewsmobile.com anyone?)… no.

TLD? hmm not really, like the hostname part it’s usage has become a bit confusing over the past few years and it’s the only part of the domain that’s regulated by a central body, but no… it doesn’t really fit here either.

SO, where does the techie suggest we specify that we’re looking for a mobile version of the site?… simple!

http://www.smstextnews.com/mobile

The end-user in me doesn’t give a toss what the techie says about standards and just wants a simple universal way to tell a site that he would like a mobile-formatted version. He wants to type m.domain.com, it’s the simplest way to get the results he needs, he’s made his mind up and there will be no arguing with him.

The businessman wants to please his customers, after all, a happy customer is a returning customer… or so he believes. He’s had a chat with the techie guy and he’s been told that it’s actually quite a simple practice to setup m.domain.com, http://www.domain.mobi and http://www.domain.com/mobile to all point to the same mobile version and let the end-user choose.

So what’s the correct answer? until a single universal standard emerges (and that will be chosen by the end user, NOT a governing body or company) the best practice would be to guess which one your end-user is going to try and make sure that your site is available for him or her on whatever method he or she should choose.

Or the short version:

http://www.google.mobi redirects to http://www.google.com/mobile while m.google.com shows you the normal Google homepage (with browser detection trickery to show you a mobile specific search page). Take from that what you will!.

Someone give them a Web 2.0 dictionary and educate these fools. Stop hindering the progress of the new Mobile era.

I’m painfully addicted to the Mobile Web. I use it for everything that I possibly can, and even when I don’t really need it, I’ll make up a use.

I agree wholeheartedly that there is a vast difference between “WAP”, the Internet – made mobile, and the actual Mobile Web.

I use a Nokia N95, which is more than capable of surfing full-on websites thanks to the killer browser. However, I still find myself pulling up the mobile versions of most websites. Why? Because for most mobile sites, it’s very easy to see that thought was put into how I would want to use the site, given my limited interaction abilities. Smaller screen, less keys, no mouse, etc.

The mobile web is making use of the buzzword of the hour in mobile industry: user experience.