Mobilising Content

Quentin Ellis, 09 Jun 2009

We all know that the digital industry involves plenty of change, and continuous adaption and development of digital delivery is required in order to stay up to date.

In the past few years, one of the biggest areas of change has been the amount of internet users who are accessing websites via phones and mobile devices. As a result, marketing professionals have a growing need to be aware of this area and ready to commission websites that accommodate this audience.

The past couple of years have seen numerous new web-capable mobile devices arise, including Apple’s iPhone and its Safari browser, the creation of Google’s Android platform and Webkit-based browser, the rise of so called ‘full web’ browsers (Nokia’s S60, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini, among others), the early development of Firefox’s mobile version, and more. These mobile browsers improve users’ experiences, giving them access to websites formerly off-limits to most mobile devices. Indeed, as a 2008 Nielsen Media Research report highlighted, mobile devices have increased traffic by an average of 13% across several popular websites.

Ideally, site authors would be able to meet the growing demand for a quality mobile experience without changing a line of code. But the reality is that a site designed specifically with mobility in mind will always provide a much better user experience to mobile users, even when they are equipped with the device du jour. It’s not merely a question of network costs and delays or memory and CPU limitations. Rather, the mobile experience merits its own design, as discussed in a growing body of literature, including the W3C’s very own Mobile Web Best Practices, released in July 2008 as a W3C Recommendation.

To sum up the goal nicely: mobilise, don’t miniaturise. Mobile users operate in a very different usage context than PC users, and providing them with an experience customised to their needs is likely to be the best service you can offer to them.

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