Should Businesses Have Mobile Friendly Websites?

cellPhoneSafe: "A client of ours has asked us to develop a mobile friendly version of their website. Their CEO has a Pocket PC and his browsing experience of his site is not great. However, aside from keeping him happy, is there a business case for a mobile friendly version of his site? Is there actually any volume of web surfers using a Pocket PC, Palm, or other web-capable pocket devices? It's one thing to convince a client of the benefit of supporting Mozilla (else they'll loose 10% of potential customers), but how do the figures stack up for mobile users? To be honest, I'd be surprised if mobile users accounted for more than 1 in a 1000 visitors to a site, so I'd be interested in your experiences. Have you developed a website for mobile users? Were you overwhelmed with new customers? Did these mobile users expect a different service offering to traditional PC users?"

Not in my experience

[timmyf2371]

I would guess it's different for most people and how they use mobile browsing (if at all). Here's my take on it.

I use a mobile device quite frequently to access the internet when travelling and aside from the applications such as IRC and other such utilities, I don't usually use the web browsing facility for anything *too* serious; I'll catch up on the latest news, look up the phone number for the nearest Pizza Hut and activities like that.

If there's a website I want to purchase something from, or even find information out about a particular business, I'll stick the URL in my to-do list and check it out when I'm at a PC or laptop, allowing me to look into it in more depth.

Depends on the nature of your business

[aztektum]

I work @ Sprint and a lot of our customers that look at our PDA devices have been asking the sales people "Will it work with my bank site?" There is a demand, I think, for certain businesses to offer mobile access to accounts to pay bills and all that. However does say Intel really have a reason for a "mobile" site? Would General Motors need one? But if you're a service provider (cable, utility), financial institution, or a Google or Yahoo, then catering to a mobile audience at least partially, could be a bonus.

*sigh*

[TrumpetPower!]

Anytime anybody asks these kinds of questions, it's just a vivid demonstration of how clueless said person is when it comes to just what this Intarweb thing is.

Rather than beat you over the head with your misunderstandings, let me just skip to the chase.

Design your sites in this order, and you'll never be concerned with these kinds of questions again.

1. Design your site in valid XHTML / HTML 4.0 / whatever that looks good in lynx.
2. Knock yourself out with CSS to make it look fantastic in your personal favorite choice of Firefox, Safari, Mozilla, Konqueror, etc.
3. Add just enough <!--[if IE]>blah<[endif]--> statements to make it look good in all versions of IE that're still supported by Microsoft.
4. If somebody points out handheld devices, screen readers, etc., that understand CSS but do a poor job of rendering the CSS you used on your site, create a custom stylesheet just for them.

That's it. That's all there is to it. When you're done, you've got a Web site that looks great on all platforms and validates to all meaningful standards. And, if it weren't for Microsoft, you could reasonably forget the last two steps.

Cheers,

b&

It's a lot like accessibility.

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

How about making the site accessible for screen readers to assist the disabled. If you look into it, you will find that It has a lot in common with mobile users... Nobody can remember 15 menu items when they hear them, and then navigate back to them. Nobody can understand pages when they are described if they are too complicated.

You need to radically simplify presentation to make them comfortably usable by the bandwidth impaired, be it visual bandwidth in terms of vision, or using magnifiers, or using a PDA, or in terms of having the keep the structure in you head while listening to the page being
described.

If the company is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and employees are expected to access the site, then they are pretty much compelled to make it accessible. You can
get PDA support for free riding on that.

Re:*sigh*

[Eustace Tilley]

I think you are a behind-the-times anonymous coward.

Opera Mini [opera.com] claims to support the vast majority of WAP-capable phones.

Maybe this is the wrong way to think about it

[hey!]

I've often found myself resisting something that the boss wants because it not only fails to justify itself, it creates a long term maintenance burden.

And figured out later that while I was right in my narrow analysis, in the broader analysis I was wrong.

Sometimes solving a more general problem is easier than solving a specific problem. It's always more cost effective than solving an endless sequence of specific problems. If you keep an open mind, you often give the boss what he wants -- and more than he ever asked for. It seems to me that best web development practices would both help a great deal with this problem and with downstream maintenance. The reason we don't do the right thing most of the time is the pressure from management for quick results.

So, in that case what you have here is an opportunity. The boss has something in your purview that he cares about. Depending on how you frame this problem, you either have a pointless exercise in satisfying a CEO whim, or you have a CEO who has stumbled on the importance of separating content and presentation. If you treat it like the former, you're committing to a permenant doubling of effort on everything you do so that it will look nice on the CEO's PDA. If you treat it like the latter, you can make the CEO happy while reducing your downstream maintenance costs.