If you'd like business to come from the small screen, follow this guide from Inkriti's CEO.
It is a cliché to talk about the rapid growth of mobile devices for phone, chat, texting, etc. What draws far less consideration is the impact of the growing trend toward accessing the internet on mobile devices. If you work in ebusiness, however, you do need to consider some of the following things:
- Can I attract more traffic to my website by tailoring it to mobile devices?
- Can I provide for a better customer experience by customizing my website for mobile devices?
- Will the frequency of my customer visits go up because they now have the flexibility to easily access my website through a mobile device?
While devices like the iPhone do provide for an experience relatively similar to a PC-oriented website, there are hundreds of other devices -- cell phones, BlackBerrys, Treos, PDAs and gaming devices like Playstation, Xbox -- that require a different view of a website, for a better, faster customer experience.
What's new about mobile browsing?
The most important difference when thinking about mobile browsing is the form factor. While most websites are designed for a 1200 x 1680 display or sometimes even as low as 800 x 600, most of the mobile devices work with displays smaller than 320 x 320. This can result in several important tradeoffs:
- You will not be able to show all the content that you show on your wired website. Consequently, a lot of the content would need to be laid out in a different manner, moved onto different pages, moved up/down/left/right on a particular page or simply removed.
- More sophisticated content like AJAX, JavaScript and Flash may not render correctly in a mobile device; this needs to be accounted for.
A second difference is that the browser universe is different. From specialized browsers like Openwave, Access and BlackBerry, you need to contend with specialized browsers from the more traditional vendors for the wired world, such as IE, Firefox and Opera. This would mean another level of complexity in controlling your website experience, IT development needs and web experience testing requirements.
A third difference is that the bandwidth assumptions that are made for a wired world may not necessarily apply to this universe. This again may have implications about what content is shown, what is not, whether to show images or not, how videos will be shown, etc.
A fourth difference is in the browser navigation pattern. Wired websites assume a mouse and a keypad with enter, space and tab keys. This navigation model doesn't necessarily translate to mobile devices. While more basic operations like clicking on a hyperlink or hitting a submit button might be simple enough, more advanced operations like keying in information might need more customization.
A fifth difference is that any advanced applications -- like the upsell/cross-sell at the shopping cart level, detailed checkout, product configuration or product visualizer -- may not translate to mobile devices well. If they are important enough to be shown to mobile users, they might need reworking.
How to get started?
A good place to start would be to evaluate the nature and amount of mobile traffic coming to your current website. By doing a few tweaks to your analytics system, you can get a good sense for the amount of mobile traffic coming to your site, and also understand the kind of devices that it is coming from: smartphones, BlackBerrys, Treos, etc.
The next step would be to understand whether the goals of this mobile traffic are different from the traffic to your wired site. For example, do visitors perform specific functions (e.g., browse the latest baseball scores on a sports website, check the status of an order they have placed, check the weather, etc.) or do they just browse the site and take in the entire website experience? A breakdown of this traffic and understanding of the click patterns will provide powerful insights into how the mobile website can be adapted to meet the specific needs of your mobile users.
The final step would be to evaluate whether it makes sense to do infrastructure investments to provide a mobile version of your website. It is important to be pragmatic in this venture, and an important scoping factor will be the number and kind of devices that you want to support for a customized experience. The IT costs can vary significantly based on this decision.
Thinking about technology solutions
At this stage, optimizing your website for mobile audiences will require customization, as there are very few, if any, products that can provide this off-the-shelf. Regardless of whether you do it internally or outsource it, there are a few important guidelines to follow:
- Customizing your mobile website should never involve back-end development in the form of changing business logic or doing database work, etc. Fundamentally all work should be limited to the front-end -- meaning at the HTML/XHTML/XML level. This simple observation will make this effort a far less intrusive and far simpler initiative than if you had to touch the back-end.
- There will be multiple transformers that change the core HTML/XHTML/XML that is available to the wired website, into a transformed mobile website that is unique to that device/form-factor, etc.
- The architectural design pattern to follow for these transformers -- called a "Factory Pattern" -- essentially provides a unique transformer object to each incoming request based on the nature/form-factor of the requesting device.
There is much involved in determining whether or not to mobilize your ebusiness site. While the segment of the population that accesses your business' site over a mobile device may be growing, you should first determine whether this growth is significant enough to warrant making the necessary changes to your internet site. Once that is determined, all work should be limited to the front end, so as not to alter a properly built wired internet site. To minimize the alterations and speed the development process, it may help to employ a solutions integrator that is familiar with designing sites for ebusinesses.
Vinod Pabba is CEO and co-founder of Inkriti Solutions. Read full bio.
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