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(Article first published in Feb '10. It has been modified slightly to suit its publication on our site)
Whether you have heard about the "Mobile Web" or not it's an area which is literally exploding. To give you an example of just how quickly this growth is happening we need to look at history. It took approximately 15 years for the internet to really bed itself into the general psyche, whereby these days even your grandmother "Googles" knitting patterns or new recipes. From a business perspective, not having a website today is commercially ludicrous! It took this long because a number of factors had to come together for it to be viable and they were all interlinked.
Firstly, connection speeds had to improve, secondly, various technologies had to be developed to allow businesses to do everything from display a simple website, to providing very complex catalogue and purchasing systems. Thirdly, millions of websites had to be made available. Finally, we all had to learn to love The Web. This amazing convergence of technology and psychology has come together so that now more than 90% of people will "Google" something before opening the Yellow Pages to find it.
This has created an extremely fertile environment for the mobile web, which will reach maturity in the next two to three years. However, even at this early stage, the number of people browsing the mobile web is staggering! In August 2009, 2 PetaBytes of data were downloaded in a single month. For those non technical people, that's a thousand, thousand, thousand megabytes (or 2 to the 15th bytes!). To really help understand how big a deal this is, it would take a person using an average speed broadband connection just under 520 years to download that amount of data! That equates to a lot of people using their phones to browse the web and the number continues to grow each month.
But why do we need a "mobile" internet when there's a perfectly good internet already in place? Well, it comes down to a few key factors:
- The way we live is changing as we are all keeping in contact with each other more while on the move. People don't want to wait until they get home or to the office to update their friends and contacts on their lives, so applications like Facebook and Twitter are driving the usage of the internet on the move. This in turn is driving people to use their mobile phones to browse the web more and more.
- Mobile phone data connection speeds have increased exponentially over the last couple of years and the cost of mobile data browsing has dropped at the same rate. Buy an iPhone today and you can pretty much browse the web all day, every day, for no extra cost!
- The mobile web is possibly the biggest development in the world since the internet was invented and Google seems to agree. So much so that it has created a separate index for mobile content. This means that if you have a mobile website, you are more likely to be found in searches conducted on a mobile phone than those businesses that do not.
- With the convergence of the GPS into telephones, the future for mobile searches is the ability to provide you with results that are physically closest to you. So you might type in "Italian Restaurant" in a city you are visiting and Google will show you the details of a restaurant around the corner from where you are standing! This technology isn't here yet, but it's not far away.
- Browsing a traditional website on a mobile phone is at best annoying and at worst impossible. The answer therefore is a website design with content that is created specifically for mobile web browsing. But it doesn't stop there...
- Unlike PCs that have standard sized screens and resolutions, mobile phone screens come in many different sizes and configurations. A mobile website design needs to be built to work whether it is viewed on the latest iPhone, a 12 month old Nokia phone or perhaps even a 2 year old Motorola phone! That's a complex issue to resolve, but one that is becoming easier every day with the latest tools.
- Even the most technophobic PC user is generally happy using a mobile phone and so mobiles could be the gateway into the web for the millions of people who still do not own a PC/laptop.
So the moral of the story is that the mobile web is growing rapidly thanks to its big brother paving the way. There are still some hoops that need to be jumped through, but for those willing to do it the benefits are potentially huge. The bottom line is that if you are a progressive and forward thinking business owner you may or may not get a mobile website in 2010, but I would bet you definitely will in 2011 at the latest. If you are involved in retail or dealing with the public then make it 2010.
Franco De Bonis has worked in the field of sales and marketing promotion since 1990 and was most recently the global marketing manager for a major international technology company before setting up The DG Group in January 2007.
The DG Group is dedicated to delivering all the marketing solutions any company may require. Whether it's a website or leaflets and brochures, or even some product packaging; The DG Group will manage the whole project, providing sound guidance along the way.
The content in this section is the original creation of The DG Group and is protected by copyright. You may use this content on your site or in other materials providing you acknowledge DG Group as the author and include a link to our site.
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