Give your Website visitors the site they deserve...

As quickly as mobile Web traffic grows, so mobile devices become increasingly fragmented. With a vast array of screen sizes, operating systems and capabilities, it is essential for your Website to detect and react to the specific device each of your mobile visitors is using.

There are about 6,500 different models of mobile device (feature phones, smartphones, tablets etc) that are capable of accessing your Website. If you identify the handset used by each mobile visitor to your Website, you can optimize their experience accordingly. This not only makes your customer’s visit as pleasant as possible, it also allows you to make assumptions about the visitor based on what handset they use and target services, promotions and advertising according to the handset type and its abilities.

These are some important answers to questions you should be asking.


1) Why should we care if a visitor to our Website is on a mobile device?

Website owners can no longer operate under the naive assumption that most traffic to their site comes from PCs. This was the case a few years ago, but the Web has moved on – these days more and more people use their mobile devices as their primary way to interact with the Web. Yes, site owners can opt to simply do nothing, and hope that their existing site works sufficiently well for this purpose, but this strategy has a number of shortcomings:
• Most mobile phones will struggle or fail to render (display) a desktop-oriented Website. The vast majority of people around the world today do not have a smartphone (only 1 in 5 mobile phones sold last year was a smartphone, according to IDC). If non-smartphone-owning customers are important to your business – as they should be – you also need a Website that works on these lower-end handsets.
• Even on smartphones, most sites will give a much better user experience if the content is adapted to the device. This doesn't just mean making things smaller, to fit the small screen or speed up the time it takes for the page to load, the content supplied should also be more relevant. While PC users are usually sitting in an office or at home, mobile users are often out-and-about – their context means they have different requirements.
• No matter how great a mobile device is, Web surfing can only ever be as good as the performance of the mobile network, right here, right now. The connection is rarely going to be as good as a PC on a fixed broadband connection. Reducing the page and picture sizes can really improve user experience even for smartphone users. And if the customer is has a limited or pay-as-you-go data package a streamlined site will save them money.
• Check out this link to view the top 20 Websites on your mobile device – 18 out of 20 detect mobile devices and deliver a site that is appropriate. Why do they do this? It’s because they want to deliver a better experience for customers. (http://www.alexa.com/topsites)

2) We’ve got a mobile site – isn’t that good enough for all mobile devices?


It's a good start, but probably not sufficient for companies that really want to serve customers well. Mobile devices differ vastly in capabilities, far more so than desktops. It's not just screen dimensions that change either – some really fundamental differences separate modern devices: cameras, GPS, accelerometers, landscape/portrait orientation, and touch-screen – all of these capabilities may or may not be present. You can serve a one-size-fits-all site, or you can embrace the capabilities of the device in question to make the user experience better – it depends on how far you want to go to ensure a good customer experience.


3) What can we do when we know the functions and characteristics of a handset?

The most important thing to do with knowledge of the functions of a handset is to use this knowledge to improve the user experience. Some specific examples:
• If the device supports tel: or wtai: hyperlinks, you should ensure that all phone numbers are hyperlinked so that the user can click-to-call phone numbers on a page.
• If the device has GPS, you should ensure that the user's location is picked up from GPS rather than forcing them to enter location data in a form.
• If the device has a touch-screen, you should adapt your CSS to ensure that items are big enough to be easily tapped with a finger tip.



4) Should we just concentrate on an iPhone or Android app and forget about everyone else?

No. A mobile app is not a mobile strategy, regardless of how many different types of handset you target. Sure, if you know for certain that all your customers use either Android or iPhones, fine – go ahead and make an app for them and they'll be happy. But bear in mind that the vast majority of phones are not iPhones or Android phones (of 1,596 million mobile devices sold in 2010 only 114 million (7 percent) were iOS or Android, according to Gartner… and the installed base will be less).
A true mobile strategy embraces all of the mobile devices out there, not just the ones of the well-heeled audiences. Remember too, that each mobile ecosystem has its own submission procedures, rules and idiosyncrasies. Each time you update your app, you will run up against these issues. Right now the mobile Web is the only way to reach the whole audience in one fell swoop. The customer benefits, too: no need to repeat the download each time the app is updated, lower bandwidth requirements and transparent updates.



5) What difference does HTML5 make?

HTML5 is the new version of the Website programming language HTML. It allows the mobile Web to come much closer to native apps in their functionality. HTML5 allows Web pages to store data, work offline, look fantastic and use rich interactions. A well-written HTML5 mobile Web app is almost indistinguishable from a native app and almost every smartphone platform already supports it.

Should you build a Mobile App or Mobile Website?