Should Businesses Have Mobile Friendly Websites? 117
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?"
mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:5, Interesting)
I can only speak from my personal experiences with mobile internet, and they've been mostly disappointing, but I think the shortcoming is more in the form factor and less in the reluctance or resistance of the internet developers to provide mobile compatible web sites.
I first surfed "mobile" with a cell phone, "duette" (can't remember the manufacturer, doesn't matter). It had a small something-like six or seven line black and white character based screen. The access to the internet was provided by the phone service, and apparently they pretty much mapped the web sited you would access, there was no notion of "address bar" (that I remember). The speed was slow, the sites were rarely updated, and the presentation was terrible.
Fast forward to a month ago when I got the latest Palm with hi-res screen and wi-fi built in. I mostly got it for the high quality screen (which has not disappointed) but looked forward to also having near hi-res internet experience. This device has essentially half-VGA resolution and hence gives "normal" surfing access to the internet.
I've not encountered too many sites that bother to accommodate mobile devices, and after using the Palm TX for a while I see why. The Palm is probably one of the better devices for screen quality and even then (even when a site "does mobile"), the experience is unsatisfactory. (Google actually does a mobile presentation, but I actually would prefer it didn't -- the real estate and presentation is SO clamped down, I'd prefer panning the screen.)
In my opinion, I don't think there is much to be done about creating a satisfactory, let alone a "great" experience for mobile devices. Their form factor is just too small -- there are far too many people who, even with high resolution, cannot use these to surf the net comfortably.
If I were making decisions about a web site and whether to accommodate mobile devices my first instinct would be to ignore that niche. I wonder if there are any compelling counters to this experience?
Umm... another "It Depends" answer (Score:2, Interesting)
Really depends on the companies needs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Umm... another "It Depends" answer (Score:3, Interesting)
That will of course tend to undercount it quite a bit. How many people will even try, knowing from experience that commercial sites almost never work unless they specifically say so on their homepage?
It reminds me of my (former) bank that stated they will never allow Mozilla since none of their customers use it - which they of course did not since they couldn't.
Is your site interactive? (Score:3, Interesting)
* Reference lookups (ie, directions)
* News updates (Drudge is surprisingly accessible, and many blogs work too); I tend to do this after receiving a "Breaking News" SMS message from one of my local TV stations (nbc739.com)
* Sites that use interactivity
To expound on the later, I run a couple of different "portal" type sites that allow me to log in, view profiles, and get information on other people. With that sort of customization available, we're creating mobile-friendly calendars, phone lists, photo galleries, and news updates, all to allow people to access things wirelessly and get "what they need."
If your website is basically a brochure, then no, you probably don't need a mobile-friendly site per-se (although you do need to make it WAI-accessible for the disabled). If your site has something to do on it that someone might want to do when they are away from a terminal, then by all means start developing. As someone else said, it's almost a chicken-and-egg problem. But once people see that they can access your features more conveniently, I'd wager you'll see usage improve.
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:3, Interesting)
I do think at least a basic mobile site is important though. Basic information such as contact info, hours, product descriptions, etc should be available for mobiles.
CSS, money, and reality... (Score:2, Interesting)
I personally like the idea of sites working on as many screens, devices, OSes, browsers as possible so I'd do it just for that warm fuzzy feeling that that 1 in 100000000 customers sees that you've thought of them and you gain +1 respect from them which could come in handy for their next purchase of a product like the one you supply.