MobileWebsiteWatch

In a press release from comScore today, the boom in the everyday use of mobile web to get things done was confirmed and reinforced. According to the report, in June 2008, more then 20.8 million U.S. mobile subscribers accessed search during the month, an increase of 68% over same month year prior.

“It is interesting to note that as we see the number of mobile search users increase, the frequency of activity is also growing,” observed Alistair Hill, analyst, comScore. “The number of U.S. users accessing mobile search has more than doubled as a result of expanded 3G penetration and smartphone adoption, as well as the proliferation of flat-rate data plans. We have also seen a substantial improvement to the mobile search offerings in the U.S. market.”

As more and more people search for things on thier mobile devices, the more important it becomes to offer a mobile Web site for them to interact with.  What good is your store or office if your customers can’t even walk in the door.  The expectation of mobile optimized Web sites is now basic for most customers.

Furthermore, customers who arrive at your site via mobile search are likely your best customers.  If they search for you on their phone, and then go to your site, this means that they are on the go, away from their computers, and most likly to be seeking specfic information on how to interact with you: such as finding contact information, store locations, buying a ticket or a specific product, or reviewing information about your products and pricing while shopping.

In the second of a recent two part article on MocoNews, the major Olympic mobile WAP sites are reviewed and rated.  Credit has to be given to the writer for taking note that the sites reviewed in this part of the article were not up to the standard of mobile site that can be found outside of the realm of WAP, the elephaont in the room remains ‘why are these sub-par WAP sites the mobile homepages of these major news organizations if such better experinces can be put together for one event?’

In our second of a series (first is here) of reviews on mobile content from the Olympics, we took a look at the major sports news sites – ESPN (NYSE: DIS), NBC Sports, CBS (NYSE: CBS) Sports and Fox Sports – to see which is providing the best mobile experience on their mobile site’s homepages. Using a Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E71 and Nokia’s web browser, we compared each of the companies’ mobile WAP sites to determine which gave more credence to the global competition and how each presented Olympics-related content on a mobile phone. Albeit richer experiences can be had outside the constraints of WAP, results we encountered for purposes of this review were disappointing.

Two specific areas that were particularly bemoaned were:

1. The lack or video content available, and;
2. Poor mobile search architecture and content structure within the site

While the lack of streaming video content is not particulary suprising, since it is probably not offered anyway and also the Nokia E71 browser does not support video output when in WAP mode.  The more relevant gripe tot he world of mobile web enthusiasts at large is the issues about search performance and overall organization.

In the first installment of this article, the “medals” awarded to the mobile sites lay out their overall performance and all the top performers were all noted for intuitive layout and releveant content.  In fact, some of the sites were even noted as offering more content and still not ranked as highly.  This is just a simple fact of the mobile world, it doesn’t take much content before the user experience gets messy.

As far as getting bad results on these sites search pages on the phone for detecting mobile optimized content goes, the soltuion is to do something othe than WAP.   Namely, build a site ethat outputs to WAP only if it has to.  By optimizing the pages that already exist, you can be assured that the search box will not call content that the browser can’t display.

The worst performer was CBS, according to the review. “Not a single mention of the Olympics on CBS Sports Mobile main page and nothing under its menus and categories. Only after clicking on ‘more headlines’ did we pull up a few Olympics-related stories. After searching specifically for ‘Olympics,’ the site returned more than 100 links to news articles aggregated from various news outlets.”

That highlights a persistent problem across many WAP sites: the fact that many search boxes doesn’t seem at all tuned for mobile use. It’s painful to discover that on the go, when suddenly your handset freezes up because it’s trying to download and digest a huge desktop site that it can’t even render properly.

A good example of a website that truly employs best practices and avoids all these WAP woes is one like American Airlines.  If you go http://aa.com on a Nokia N70, for example, you will be automatically redirected to mobile.aa.com and will see a WAP view.

Now take an iPhone and also go to http://aa.com.  You are, again, detected and automatically redirected to http://mobile.aa.com, but this time you see a special view for the iPhone.  If you use a Blackberry, same thing, it always looks perfect.

The platform that spits this view back to you is much more intelligent than a simple WAP site.  Ideally this is the way that all mobile Web sites should be designed.  WAP site are cluncky and need a lot of maintenence to keep them up to date.  CMS sites that are just smaller versions of content are even worse.

Luckily, the tide is turning and major brands, like American Airlines, are making the appropriate adjustments to properly support the rapidly growing number of people who simply won’t accept a WAP-experience.