This week I questioned the validity of a number of recent statistics on how many mobile friendly websites existed. My own investigation, which I recently posted on mStrategy, revealed that there were far fewer mobile friendly websites than other researchers have reported. My conclusion is not that they have invented their data but that they have a loose understanding of what mobile friendly is.

Mobile Lazy
Serving your PC website direct to mobile browsers is not friendly; it is ‘Mobile Lazy’! Your website will not recognise the mobile user’s real time location or their behaviour, you will not be able to consider the unique capabilities of the mobile device, you create barriers that prevent the consumer interacting easily with you and potentially a needlessly poor experience for your customer.

Neither should you assume that mobile friendly means dumbing down your website or brand and providing lowest-common-denominator output to cater for all devices. There are technologies out there, including Wapple’s, that allow you to present rich and dynamic content, whilst optimising the best experience possible for every single type of mobile phone and customer.

Mobile Friendly
A mobile-friendly website should present the same web company branding but one that is designed for small-screen display and browsing. It should take into account the mobility of the consumer and present only relevant information and content from the website for their ‘in-situ’ need.

It should interact with them for their unique device and provide mobile-specific opportunities such as location-based offerings. Interaction should be simple and easy with few clicks, forms should be low maintenance and contact numbers should display as click-to-call.

Here at Wapple we put a team together to visit a number of urls to determine exactly how friendly or lazy some of these big brand websites are across a spectrum of mobile devices.
There is clearly a lot of knowledge to impart but it is not rocket science and over the coming weeks I intend to demonstrate exactly how easy it is to become Mobile Friendly by publishing examples of websites that are Mobile Friendly and those that are utterly Mobile Lazy…you might be surprised by the results.

To get things kicked off, here is our first example Covergirl are…Mobile Friendly

Mobile Web Pioneer. Co-Founder & COO of Wapple.Net. Spreading Mobile Love. Join Me

Connect me on Facebook | Twitter | Google + | LinkedIn | Website