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?
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:1)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
When I view it on my Treo 650,
Every
word
of
every
sentence
is
stacked
on
top
of
each
other
like
this.
BTW
this
happened
when
they
released
the
new
css
compliant
version.
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
yes (Score:1)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
I am going to purchase a Nokia 770 tablet here in the near future, and I am doing more browsing using my blackberry than I ever thought I would. (Checking flight itineraries, etc.)
IMHO, I think there really is a future in mobile browsing, but I don't think it should be the coder's responsibility to make a site mobile-compatible. I think Apache et al. should step up to the plate and automatically
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:1)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:1)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
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.
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:1)
With Plucker installed on your Palm, you can read any Internet web pages, ebooks, text-files, or other documents you want at any time, simply by converting it with Plucker's desktop tools, and sending it to your Palm for reading on your Palm handheld.
Obviously it's not a real-time browser, but offline only. But not one of my favorit
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
sig - ot (Score:2)
either that, or they are not online
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:2)
Re:mobile internet, not much fun, even if improved (Score:1)
On the other hand, if your web site advertises your car dealership or something, it may be less important. You co
Chicken and egg? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Chicken and egg? (Score:2)
They won't get volume if their sites don't render correctly.
I've experiemented with using CSS '@media handheld' on my sites but the sites I have aren't really geared for the mobile market.
Not in my experience (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
This will happen when... (Score:1, Offtopic)
The web has become so commercialized that it's not even the web anymore. It's just an advertisement forum.
Umm... another "It Depends" answer (Score:2, 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.
Re:Umm... another "It Depends" answer (Score:2)
A look at our logs of 2005 says that a whopping 0.03% of our visitors used Windows CE. Maybe I should check for some more signs of a mobile user, and get to the estimated 0.1% figure.
But our website is not mobile-friendly. Those visitors probably were scared away pretty quickly. How can I know what would happen if the site indeed worked for them?
Re:Umm... another "It Depends" answer (Score:1)
I think the better question would be, how valuable would your site be to people on the go that are not in front of a computer? If you have a mostly informational site then I wouldn't convert if possible. However if you have a service to find the nearest coffee shop, see stock prices in real-time, or bid on a auction then having your site mo
Treo 650 Experience (Score:1)
Actually for
Re:Treo 650 Experience (Score:1)
I think
Re:Treo 650 Experience (Score:1)
I read
I'm on my Treo all the time. ALL the time. Be it playing games, getting email, listening to music or watching movies. I have it out always. I want more! I'm greedy, I know.
Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:2, Informative)
Given the fact that most websites have problem asking money from traditional site visitors, I find it hard to believe any additional spending can be justified by most websites.
Having said that, some niche websites, which either [1] are built primarily for mobile users (that is, mobile friendly website is in the initial budget) or [2] offer valuable content which mobile users are willing to pay for.
Re:Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:2)
Re:Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:2)
Re:Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:2)
Can anyone tell me why web designers do that? They don't know HTML?
Re:Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:2)
Re:Would mobile users pay for such websites? (Score:1)
Though you're correct, what's silly about that is that a lot of sites run off of databases etc. It shouldn't be that hard for sites like Slashdot or Engadget to support PDAs. (Not saying they don't, I wouldn't know, just using them as an example.) Simply write a simpler template that pulls the info out of and throws it on the screen. It was a lot harder back in the days of doing everything in HTML, but with all the
Really depends on the companies needs... (Score:3, Interesting)
Not hard to do... (Score:2)
As far as how many users would actually notice - I can't say. But since it shouldn't be a huge timesink, I don't see a reason not to.
This of course depends on the type of site; Newegg.com, for example, probably shouldn't attempt a full mobile store, but displaying current sale items or maybe (a much reduced version of) your account pa
Depends on the nature of your business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends on the nature of your business (Score:2)
Not many... (Score:2)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)
No idea what he/she will actually see. Our site does not even support MSIE 4 anymore. But MSIE 4 on CE may be different?
We had 0.03% Windows CE visitors last year. I don't think I'll spend time on that.
I have a Dell Axim X51v (Score:1)
Operating System: Microsoft WinCE
Browser: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Windows CE; PPC; 240x320)
Javascript: version 1.2
Monitor Resolution: 480 x 640
Monitor Color Depth: 16 bits
It would be nice if more people designed sites that worked on PDAs but, as other posters have commented, if my PDA has access then usually my ultra-portable laptop can too so I just use that.
Re:Not many... (Score:1)
Re:Not many... (Score:2)
It seems Opera partly follows the stylesheet, partly ignores it, in a way that makes the navigation still usable and the content readable.
It amazes me because the site was never designed for this.
I know that it does not work on MSIE 4 but I think MSIE version numbering is inconsistent across platforms (MSIE 5 on Mac is different from MSIE 5 on Windows, for example).
pretty simple... (Score:2, Informative)
Be sure to hide all the big images as well.
If you have a big audience on cells or pda's, you may want to optimize it a little more, doing things like putting a menu right at the top of the page, lot's of "back to tops", etc.
Once again, you won't be doing any of this without standards.
*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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&
BING BING BING! We have a winner! (Score:2)
The answer to "should businesses have mobile friendly websites" is MU!
If the website is designed correctly, it will already be "mobile" friendly (as well as everything-else friendly).
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
I regularly try to browse using cellphones and stuff like my pocket Zaurus 6000SL. Some sites, like news.bbc.co.uk, work perfectly. Most others give a blank page or something about as useless.
Dammit, it's not that hard!
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Try reading that on a palm.
I used to have a Newton, so sometimes I think about how it woul
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
That's your problem right there. It's a bit dumb to assume that users are running at any particular resolution (or that they always run their web browser full screen).
If you drop this requirement your websites will scale to different devices much better.
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Scalable design is very hard, and not rewarding because the sacrifices you have to make are to big: both sites will probably look like crap. I would end up designing two sites - and looking at things like usability and purpose of the site that would pr
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Then you are a shitty web designer, and within 5 years will be out of a job, no matter how pretty you make things look.
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Just because I think content+desgin for big screen internet does not translate well to content+design for handheld internet by merely using a script??
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
No, because you don't seem to realize that designing a site with standardized HTML/XHTML and CSS has nothing to do with "scripts".
"Designing" websites is a lot more that drawing pretty pictures.
Re: *sigh* (Score:2)
yurigoul, repeat after me: THE WEB IS NOT A MAGAZINE. A web site is NOT about creating a pixel-for-pixel copy of your favourite design on someone else's screen, because you have no idea what their 'screen' is like, and they may have radically different design preferences from yours.
If you want something like that, use PDF. Or use image files. But that's not a web site.
Remember that my system may have a very different screen from yours. It might just have many more or fewer pixels; its r
Re: *sigh* (Score:1)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
Do you know nowadays there are tons of people using displays with different width screens? Even many notebooks have widescreens nowadays with high resolutions that would make 800x600 look weird or require users to tweak their displays and sizes.
By the way, can you please explain why so many "web designers" like to use javascript for _links_, when they could just use normal HTML links? y'know <a href="....">link</a>
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Part of creating a website is drawing an area on my screen and start working within it. The other part is asking what should be done with the site. For a smaller screen both are different: smaller area, other purpose.
I have a 17" imac, so my screen size is different, too. A site for 800*600 screen works as well he
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
There's your problem right there. This is a print mentality, not a web one. As a designer, you should be designing sites that can "bend" into a variety of screen resolutions and platforms, becuase that is your canvas.
But heck, I even like to use tables instead of div, just because I try to minimize the risk.
The risk of what? Producing something of quality? Designing on the web has come a long way since 1997. If you don't
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
No, it most certainly does not. Visit those websites I linked to and learn. The web is not a paper medium.
Re:*sigh* (Score:1)
accessibility for disabled, too (Score:2)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2)
That is a myth. A mobile phone normally has a 1.5 inch screen of 80x100 or 100x150 pixels, capable of displaying 8-12 lines of 20-30 characters (i.e. 150 to 360 characters). With CSS you are not going to be able to make a normal webpage with 10 kB of text to be practical on such a small screen, simply because you need to scroll down 50 screens just to see the bare text and links. Apart from that, these users might be
Re:*sigh* (Score:4, Insightful)
Opera Mini [opera.com] claims to support the vast majority of WAP-capable phones.
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Informative)
CSS and "accept" headers will decide how the page is rendered, but you basically don't need to write seperate pages anymore - just follow the standards, and the useragent will render it appropriately.
It's a lot like accessibility. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Four and one was me (Score:1)
Use CSS (Score:4, Informative)
If your site is written properly, i.e. using CSS for layout, then at the very least you can simply disable CSS for mobile visitors, not very pretty but doesn't block any content. The best option would be to have a style sheet with it's media set to handheld to tailor the content they see. Hide unnecessary stuff, and format the rest in a compact fashion:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css"Opera is useful for testing these styles (Shift+F11) and the Web developers toolbar [chrispederick.com] adds this feature to firefox. A very well made site compatible with handhelds is none other than opera.com [opera.com], everything on their site has a well optimised handheld version.
Best practices and theory (Score:4, Informative)
Now for best practices- go light on the graphics, better if you MUST have pictures should be a link to the picture, not an IMG tag. Text only. Few people have the newer Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with the hi-res screen- think 240 pixels wide. These devices are great for vertical scrolling, bad for side scrolling. Keep entry to links or single field with a submit button- javascript may not work well, and typing is a real pain on these devices. Same idea with pictures- think 240x240 or 240x320 at most.
Support Opera on Nokia 6600 or lose my custom (Score:1, Troll)
It is not difficult.
Yes (Score:5, Funny)
make their web
pages small enough
for cellphone
users to read.
Re:Yes (Score:2)
Re:Yes (Score:2)
thr wb pgs sml enuf
4 mobe usrs 2 rd!
LOL!
Most sites are so bad... (Score:2)
First, browsers on PocketPC are horrific. My pocketpc has more ram available to it that most computers I used in the mid nineties, yet the browsers on them are horrible. (and I don't Just mean IE, although it's one of the worst).
I think the questions you should be asking are: Is the website such that users may want access to the information on something like a pocketpc. Is it a subset of the information, j
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:Is your site interactive? (Score:2)
no (Score:1)
How? (Score:1)
Re:How? (Score:2)
degrade gracefully (Score:2)
The only legitimate use for mobile Internet (Score:1)
Since then the most mobile Internet-accessible device I've put up with is my slightly newer Dell La
Thats if Your Carrier Lets you go Outside (Score:2)
imho... (Score:1)
quaint question (Score:2)
<sneer accent="french">How naïve to imagine that software development is driven by market forces.</sneer>
Slashdot should be more mobile friendly also... (Score:2)
All sites should be "mobile friendly". (Score:2)
The only things you need to do to cause your site to be accessible by mobile devices are things that you should be doing anyway.
Don't assume anything about the client's display resolution, font size, inclination to display images, or willingness to use plugins, java, or javascript. Just write clean, correct html, and it will deal with diversity of client traits; that's one of the primary things that the language was designed to do.
If you choose to layer other froofraw on your site (eg, javascript, flash, im
UK Opinion (Score:1)
Mobile internet has so much potential - the other day, on the train coming back from a meeting, I was able to watch decent quality (i.e. good audio and non-grainy pictures on a 2 or 3 inch screen) LIVE television. I can get over 300Kbps on my phone Internet connection and am able to do a lot of stuff a few year
WHY? (Score:2)
Would I want to visit the site while I'm out with friends, while in another town, or waiting for a plane?
That's it. If you feel your potential client would, then I would go for it, but if you are met with a bunch of hypothetical maybes, then maybe it's not worth it.
How can we answer you without website Context? (Score:2)
Are you providing technology/services that can be managed by a web browser? Or is this a shopping cart for buying rocking chairs?
If you provide a web-based management interface for configuring customer services... something a technology consultant might actually NEED when equipped only with a handheld... then yes I can see the business case.
business angle? (Score:1)
Depends on what your company's site is... (Score:2)
The whole "users drive content"/"content drives users" (straw man) and "use CSS" (more in depth question) arguments aside, the larger question for me would be, is your site such in the marketplace that John Smith mobile user would come to it in his web browsing? If you're a company with something to offer John while he's driving down the freeway, maybe it's something you look into. If you're, say, a media development company, maybe John should go to his desktop, since a mobile version of your site wouldn'
CSS, money, and reality... (Score:2, Interesting)
no (Score:2)
but that isn't the primary reason for me. if my mobile device isn't capable of displaying full web pages (i.e. small laptop) then i see no point in a mobile device.
the two things I want to do on the go are
1. email/message
2. use the internet
of course, if you can do #1 (with java/javascript/dynamic pages/active content, etc) then you automatically can do #2
which is why i have yet to own a pda or smartphone. i think
Can be done (Score:1)
No phone will show anything worthwhile decently, get a PDA and use that as your aim. Also some very long/wide pages will need to be redone for the small screen, can't be helped I'm afraid.
Hope it
Main issue is over reliance on non-standard code (Score:1)
Maybe this is the wrong way to think about it (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Phone users != PDA users (Score:2)
Rubbish. Opera has made javascript available on cellphones. Digg.com's AJAX works on a Nokia 6600.
Re:What is better... (Score:1)