Of all the smartphones available on the market, iPhone seems the most popular in Australia. But worldwide they have around 15% of the smartphone market, and growing. There are tens of thousands of people using various other devices (Blackberry, Nokia smartphones/Ericsson P series, powered with Symbian), so to make them all happy is quite a trial.

But with 10% of possible visitors coming from a mobile device – more in some cases – savvy website owners had better ensure that they are making it easy for mobile customers to view and use their site. And not just for consumer-targeted businesses, business usage is increasing too – people want to use their smart mobile for practical reasons as well as fun.

You can see that the mobile web is really gaining traction:

• 36 million people are using Facebook via mobile devices (global figures).
• Australian users love to download or stream video, with 41% sometimes downloading video from their smart phone. (Nielsen 2010 Internet and Technology report)
• Neilsen in US discovered that iPhone users are a marketer’s dream: 40% have household incomes of $100K or more – twice the ratio among all subscribers (19%). No figures from Australia that I can find.

Since iPhone’s Safari browser adapts most websites to its screen, the major hurdle is ease of use (e.g. not having to scroll forever). Also steer clear of Java websites, which cannot adapt and may just show as a blue screen.

To become mobile friendly, the two choices for website development are:

- adapt your site to mobile devices, as well as different browsers, OR
- create a new simplified version – a .mobi website

This second option is the one recommended by W3, to meet their web standards best practice. FYI, .mobi websites should not be any more expensive to create and host than regular websites. Of course someone has to design them specially.

You can check your own website for mobile compatibility here:
W3C MobileOK Checker

Don’t panic if your site does not meet the criteria – because it probably will have a long list of coding and graphics no-nos that mobile devices do not like.

When We Design Your Website:

When designing your website, we test on all the major browsers. There are sometimes font based problems and graphical issues, which we go back and fix.

But with a mobile device, there are so many variations that the web developer might be adapting for 100 years! So if you want to be found on a mobile device adequately, please ask at the outset for a Mobile Compatible website. With the software we use as the basic “shell” of the website (which is then customised), there is a variety of looks and navigation options, and there are mobile device compatible themes too.

There is also a possibility to design your own mobile app (application). We have already had an enquiry for this, and are finding talent to fill this niche need. The Apple store reports now having reached 1 Billion Apps downloaded. WOW!

So are you going to look into this for your business, and cash in on the trend towards mobile web usage? Or will you sit back and say “someone ate my cheese”.