Advice Centre

The goal for any website should be to know your customers in order to deliver to them the most appropriate content.

This goal is even more important with mobile sites—not only do you need to know your customers, but you need to know what they are likely to be doing on your mobile site, as well as where they’ll be when they’re doing it. Traditional website customers are most likely sitting at a desk facing a large monitor that has a decent resolution. Visitors who are browsing your mobile site are unlikely to be in the same circumstances—they might be waiting in line, riding on the train or the bus, running to the departure gate, or lost in an unfamiliar town late at night and trying to get somewhere.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have recognised the potential of this market and are making great efforts to promote mobile commerce to users and advertisers. Most famous brands like Coca-Cola, MTV and Nike now have a mobile portal featuring content designed specifically for handheld devices. Most importantly, though, operators have reduced tariffs and introduced flat-rate plans. This means that an increasing number of your potential customers are using their mobiles to find local businesses, content providers, games and more!

Over the past few years, mobile web usage has considerably increased to the point that web developers and designers can no longer afford to ignore it. In wealthy countries, the shift is being fuelled by faster mobile broadband connections and cheaper data service. However, a large increase has also been seen in developing nations where people have skipped over buying PCs and gone straight to mobile.

Unfortunately, the mobile arena introduces a layer of complexity that can be difficult for developers to accommodate. Mobile development is more than cross-browser, it should be cross-platform. The vast number of mobile devices makes thorough testing a practical impossibility, leaving developers nostalgic for the days when they only had to support legacy browsers.

In addition to supporting different platforms, each device may use any number of mobile web browsers.