Phil Muncaster

The mobile web has had more abortive starts than my old Nissan Sunny, God rest its soul. Time and again the hubris of mobile operators got the better of them. They promised the moon on a stick but sadly slow download speeds, bulky data packets, hard-to-navigate sites, high prices and unfathomable tariffs made all their claims sound rather hollow.

From the site designer’s point of view, the proliferation of different web-enabled handsets on the market made it virtually impossible to create a site that could be viewed on all phones.

Well, it looks as if prospects for the mobile web are finally starting to improve. I know people have been saying this for some time, but this time is different, honest. Initiatives like the .mobi TLD are pushing the industry towards greater standardisation, making mobile sites more user-friendly, faster and cheaper to download. And the operators have also got the message, offering flat-rate, broadband-like tariffs that are more transparent.

Hot on the heels of T-Mobile and Orange, Vodafone launched its own web portal service recently, imaginatively entitled Vodafone Mobile Internet – I wonder how many marketing man-hours it took to dream up that one. Nevermind, it’s still a very welcome development, particularly from a web site owner’s perspective. For example, it automatically renders fixed web pages into a format that makes them easy to read and navigate on a handset. Not that it’s perfect: although it is supposed to be able to rearrange pages in a logical way, its rejig of the IT Week home page was very confusing, beginning not with the most recent stories but with far less interesting content. Once these problems are ironed out, this service should appeal to firms that would otherwise struggle to find the time and money to design their own mobile sites.

However, there will always be firms that prefer to create their own mobile sites, as this gives them more control over content and the best chance of reaching the biggest number of consumers as possible.

This is where dotMobi, the registry running the .mobi TLD, can help. It has released a range of resources that could make life easier for web managers and developers. There’s a developer guide with advice on creating content that conforms to W3C Mobile Web Initiative standards, and a useful site-testing tool, called Mobile Ready. Then there’s an online forum where developers can find training classes, guides, industry news and more.

If you’re looking for ways to reach more customers via the mobile web, take a look, or you could be sorry. As Yahoo UK managing director Glen Drury told me recently, there could be a lot of firms who miss the boat when the medium takes off.

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