Smaller businesses need to start gearing up their websites for mobile access to accommodate the growing number of people that have internet capable mobile phones and want to access information while on the move.
In February, the GSM Association announced the four billionth mobile phone connection and predicts this will increase to six billion connections by 2013, and an increasing number of these cellular devices being sold have internet capabilities.
Emerging markets like SA and the rest of Africa have vast potential for mobile internet. As far back as August 2006, the BBC carried a story on its website in which it said that of the international users that accessed its website with an internet capable mobile phone, 61% were based in Nigeria and 19% in SA. It will become increasingly attractive to access web content from a mobile phone as the internet capabilities of these devices become more advanced.
Juniper Research says by 2013, 23% of all new cell phones will be smart phones, which allow internet browsing.
Global research company In-Stat forecasts more than 300 million Wi-Fi-enabled mobile phones will be sold in 2012 and the number of mobile phones that are capable of receiving video content will exceed half a billion by then.
"Some smart phones already allow high resolution pictures to be taken and uploaded directly to the web," says Ceri James, sales and marketing director at JD Internet Consulting .
He says companies like Amazon.com and the BBC have mobile friendly websites and Radio 702 and Makro are among the local companies that do. Some mobile-friendly websites will automatically detect that the user is using a mobile device, but with websites like FaceBook users are required to access a specific address - in this case m.facebook.com, says James.
A mobile browser can be downloaded free from www.opera.com/mini/download/ allowing content to be accessed from any website in a compressed format and users can zoom into any specific area.
Companies need to understand how important it is for their customers and potential customers to access their website from a mobile device and what kind of content they are most likely to be browsing for.
Most websites cannot be accessed effectively by mobile users, in many cases because they have been created in different sections containing different content. When viewing these web pages with a mobile device, all the frames of content are squashed into one cramped page.
The more recently designed websites use techniques that overcome this problem. Websites containing a lot of high resolution graphics present another major problem for mobile users because they slow down response times when trying to access information chew up bandwidth.
"Mobile users want to be able to search for and retrieve information quickly and view it clearly on the screen."
To allow for better mobile access all the rich unnecessary content needs to be stripped out and graphic images reduced to one to two kilobytes.
"If you browse on Amazon.com with a mobile phone, all the images are small, but are of a high enough resolution to view them properly." Companies can set up specific web pages that contain a light version of the same content and a process that recognises when a mobile user is browsing and diverts them to these pages from the same website address.
However, this will require keeping the mobile-friendly web pages in sync with the main website, which could become a major issue if more than one person is posting content. It will also result in having duplicate content on the website, which the search engines do not like and might affect the website rating.
A better alternative is to build intelligence into the website that will recognise when users are browsing with a mobile phone and optimise the content and the way it is presented to them, which is becoming the trend. "This will involve a few hours of additional development to an existing website."
Information on the recently introduced international development standard for mobile website content, XHTML, can be viewed at www.w3.org .
"It is possible to have a mix of XTML and HTML generated content on a website."
Companies can check how mobile-friendly their own or any other website is against the standard by visiting: validator.w3.org/mobile/ website, says James.
Google has developed an internet tool that allows users to select a mobile view of websites when searching for information, more information about which can be found at www.google.com/pda .
Tools like Google analytics will provide a detailed breakdown of browser types and screen resolution. James says when gearing a website for mobile access it is important to work with a web development company that understands the specific
needs of these users.
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