Is your website Mobile Friendly? It should be.

teds — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:52:36 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know the new iPhone hit stores last Friday but what you may not know is that trying to find a place to buy the phone using another mobile device is downright painful – neither apple nor at&t automatically supports store lookups on the [lite] mobile web. Unfortunately Apple and at&t are not alone in this problem; despite the fact that over 30% of wireless users have browsed the internet on their mobile device, dozens of companies still fail to provide web versions of their sites.

Click in for real world examples of websites using a mobile browser as well as advice on how to make the most of your own mobile site.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you know the new iPhone hit stores last Friday but what you may not know is that trying to find a place to buy the phone using another mobile device is downright painful – neither apple nor at&t automatically supports store lookups on the [lite] mobile web. Unfortunately Apple and at&t are not alone in this problem; despite the fact that over 30% of wireless users have browsed the internet on their mobile device, many of companies still fail to provide suitable mobile versions of their sites.

Before I jump any further into this point, let’s be clear on my point. Not every business needs to build a robust mobile site capable of supporting purchases – to the contrary, most businesses should be able to get away with the most basic wireless site [for now] and many don’t require one at all. But when you think about the numbers, 30% of over 200 million devices — if you sell products, operate brick n mortar stores, or have any reason why people would use your site when they aren’t in front of their monitor and hope to keep your customers shopping with you today pay attention – this concerns you.

A couple of years ago this wasn’t an issue; phones were just that, phones and while some could check email that was the main “smart” feature. Now we have 3g, we have millions of phones with browsers, we have a mobile web. Not everyone with a phone that can browse is going on every day but from time to time millions do go on and I’d venture to guess they’re more likely to surf when they need information for a decision – when it’s time to research a product or purchase. Walk around any high cost store and you’re certain to catch a few people pulling out their blackberry’s to compare prices against other stores (apple has a commercial to this effect). Join in a conversation with the typical group of 25-34 yearolds and at some point it will touch on something that requires pulling out a phone to prove a point, research an idea or make a purchase. Even when mobile isn’t about transactions it has people Google searching for a book title or directions, updating their social networking status and doing many other things which puts people in front of mobile ads, ads which only do you good if you have a mobile site to send the person too. Mobile may not be the #1 way people get things done but for millions and millions of people – people with money – people who want to buy, mobile is a part of their everyday life.

To illustrate this point, here’s how a few major businesses look on the mobile web (screenshots made using Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile 6.0).

	Apple’s iPhone Site Upside: None Downside: You can barely navigate the site. Turning off images lets you see the links but without a wider browser it’s just too difficult to access areas and most features rely on JavaScript which Internet Explorer Mobile doesn’t have.
	At&t Store Finder Upside: None really although if you’re really patient and wait a week for the page to download and render you can kind of search. Results are possible to see but on a similarly difficult to navigate page. Downside: Same as for Apple.com, you can’t do much of anything effectively.
	Target Upside: Target auto detects mobile browsers and shows two key functions – a store locator and their weekly ad making it possible to find a location (preview results) and see a few deals (preview deals). As an added upside for more advanced devices, there’s an easy link to the full site. Downside: You can’t look up product information, pricing or availability to compare prices online but at least you can find the store’s phone number to call and ask. The features also don’t do a great job with cookies so you have to reenter your Zip Code fairly often.
	Best Buy Upside: Good alt tags make it possible to understand (I use the term loosely) the site’s structure but that’s about it. There was however an RSS link at the end of the very, very, very long homepage… in case you want an RSS feed. Downside: Navigation via mobile is possible but between the long, long list of links, background images and clutter you can’t really navigate to anything meaningful. Side Note: Google helped point me to a mobile beta of the site (see preview) which is many times better. Like Circuit City’s mobile site (next site profiled), Best Buy mobile has a store look up and you can find products complete with a small photo thumbnail, price, customer rating and sku/upc/model information (see preview). They’ve also included a quick link to dial the number directly. Hopefully this site goes live soon (it’s working as best I could tell but not loading up via bestbuy.com) so I can rescind my current upside/ downside comments.
	Circuit City Upside: Short of being order online, Circuit City’s mobile site does just about everything you could hope for from finding a store to looking up product listings, availability and prices. You can even sign up for mobile updates. They also have links to the full page along with their phone number on every single page. And those links don’t just take you to the homepage… you’ll actually end up on the same product/ category page that you were at on the mobile version which is just plain sweet. Downside: Aside from being able to order online it would be nice to have access to track past orders or at least pull up local pickup orders so you can verify the item list (and remember which store you had the order sent to) from your mobile device. But that’s much more wishlist nice to haves… the site is great for lite mobile. Really great.
	Bed, Bath & Beyond Upside: Don’t let the screenshot fool you, the site isn’t mobile. It’s long and while I was able to get myself to the store locator page, I’d pull up Google Maps long before I did that again. Downside: Besides having a horribly long url to type the site is like Apple, At&t and Bestbuy… Basic navigation is possible, but extremely difficult and what you get to is almost entirely meaningless.
	United Airlines Wireless Upside: The website allows you to perform basic functions related to traveling and managing your mobile account including looking up your flight status (see preview), getting TSA wait times, finding red carpet club locations, getting your mileage plus summary and other basic functions. Downside: There’s no way to book a ticket and with constantly increasing fees to book over the phone there’s money being left on the table for competitive booking sites to pick right up. More importantly, united.com doesn’t auto detect wireless browsers; you have to key in the mobile url to get there. Similarly you have to know your frequent flier number to access most of the tools – the email login used on their website won’t do you any good.
	CheapTickets.com Upside: They tell you they can’t serve you… That’s almost an upside. Downside: CheapTickets doesn’t just not support mobile browsers, they deny them access to their site entirely. In one sense this is a better message than nothing – not knowing you’ll have problems is annoying but at the same time, I often manage to make it through sites that aren’t mobile optimized when I have to (hence the at&t store finder results) so not being able to play at all is probably worse than being able to play but getting a notice that the ride will be bumpy at best.
	Orbitz Upside: Like at United.com, you can look up your current itineraries, check your flight status and perform a few other basic features. Orbitz doesn’t allow bookings on their mobile but they have started showing a limited number of hotels to users complete with pricing, star rating and location with a phone number to make the actual reservation. Downside: There’s still no way to book or compare prices. Luckily Orbitz doesn’t penalize phone based ordering so while it’s a major pain to wait on hold and comparing prices on a trip to Hawaii while you sit around in the airport waiting to fly to Maine in the winter isn’t going to happen, you can at least book in a pinch without a fee. Also like at United.com there’s no auto detection of wireless browsers so going to Orbitz.com results in a horrible experience as it almost looks like you can actually search for flights… only the search never works.
	Amazon Upside: You can shop online. Downside: See downside. Ok, here’s a bit more explanation… Amazon has a very, very lite site which lets you search for products, view their listings with more information than I’ve seen on any other lite mobile site (title, small image, larger images, author, free shipping eligibility, price, customer rating and actual reviews, bundles and marketplace listings). You can add items to your basket or a wishlist and from there it’s into the Amazon checkout process without any of the graphics – select your shipping address, shipping speed, credit card, gift certificates and coupons. Things go quickly, ordering via credit card is a bit of a pain but hey, it’s mobile ordering. It would be nice to see Amazon adopt a quicker way for mobile payments although perhaps if I used one-click checkout I’d have that already. But seriously, entering a full credit card number is a pain so how about PayPal, obopay, a cell phone bill or another method? Saved credit card entries work fine so it’s not the end of the world for existing account holders. It would also be nice to confirm the item but have it alert your email so you can place the order on your full computer later (ideal if you have to setup new addresses and look at more options for a gift). Right now my tests didn’t get items into my normal shopping cart so it was either order via mobile, put into a wishlist or lose the product. Again, just a few wishlist items… The point is you can order on your phone and that rocks.

As you can see, many businesses are all but ignoring mobile users, while some have the chance to give them basic service and a few even let them transact without having to log on to any “real” computer and you can do it with a simple smartphone, the kind corporations give to their employees.

Perhaps the biggest downside with mobile sites these days is the failure to auto detect mobile browsers and redirect people to them. If you offer a mobile version of your site be certain people actually get to it when they use a mobile phone… I tried almost all of the above urls on multiple phones so it’s shocking to see that some didn’t pick up on my browser type.

To take things to the next step… mobile browsing problems don’t stop with traditional “lite” mobile. Even assuming that iPhone-like full browsing takes the world by storm (which seems likely), it’s still going to show up on a 2-4″ screen with a much more limited connection rate (3g isn’t everywhere after all). So while showing people your full site may be technically possible, it’s not necessarily the best way to serve them and capture their business. At the end of the day, the site that gets the most relevant information to the user quickest wins – so drop the lengthy shopping process, the full blown navigation and 500 photos per page on your enhanced mobile version and serve up something that looks good, gets your brand across but is also usable on the subway, walking down the street or while I’m staring at a competitor’s offering at the local mall.

Don’t see why you should allocate the budget to tackle mobile this early in the game? Better hope your competitors are just as far behind the times.

A few relevant links and tools to help you test and refine your mobile site:

Windows Mobile 6 PC Based Emulator

Opera Mini Online Emulator

One of many code snippets to auto detect mobile browsers using php

And another code snippet using JavaScript

Modern Insider » mobile search

Is your website Mobile Friendly? It should be.