Hey everyone, it’s Thea here again talking mobiles today.

These things are everywhere it seems. Can you go a day without yours? Many people can’t. I can but honestly it’s a struggle. Over the last few years, they’ve really become our lifelines – it seems.

When it comes to searching, hand held searches are now said to outnumber desktop searches four-to-one*.

And of course mobiles are not just for talking anymore…Oh no, we can listen to music, have video chats, browse the web, see what our friends got up to at the weekend on Facebook, check in at our various destinations on the fly, watch video clips on  YouTube, show off our holiday pics,  Tweet about what we are doing and where at any given moment,…and a multitude other fun tasks on the mobile handsets of today.

So it seems only natural that the more forward-thinking websites owners of today have started to consider mobile versions of their business websites.

SOMETIMES SMALLER IS BETTER…

As anyone has tried to view a full website, (which may look great on a desktop with all its bells and whistles) on a mobile phone, well, let’s just say that the user experience is more often than not, less-than-pleasant.

Full sites seldom look right on small screens, they often involve a ton of scrolling (up and down, and side-to-side), and it’s usually a downright nuisance to find even the most simple of details – like the company’s phone number or an email address for fast access or communication.

Recently, James at Glasgow-Chauffeur.com launched his very own mobile website www.theglasgowchauffeur.mobi through us – making him (most likely), among the first chauffeurs in Scotland, if not the world, to embrace this new, simple and effective mobile-optimised technology.

“I’m really excited about my new mobile site. It’s easy to navigate and users can now book right through their phones, call me at the click of a button, send an email, or even look at our picture gallery to see the cars. It’s fantastic! ” – James Walker

LESS IS NOW MORE!

Whilst James may be one of our first UK clients to embrace this new mobile technology, he won’t be the last. In fact, a while back we launched this simple, affordable solution for anyone who would like a mobile version of their current website.

Like James, for under a hundred pounds (inc VAT!) you can have your own DIY clean, attractive, easy-to-set up and easy to navigate website for all mobile platforms (including iPads and the like).

The icons are inter-changeable and can be swapped out to suit your needs.

For instance, if you’re a restaurant owner, you might wish to take table reservations through the mobile site.

Also, you can not only change the icons but you can change the wording of many of them – for example  where it says “Keep Me Informed” you might change it to  “Join Our Newsletter”.

The choice is yours.

If you’re a hairdresser maybe you might want to add a coupon for 25% off your next haircut through you mobile site?

This is all easily done. You set the “valid to” and “expiration date” to suit your needs. Adjust as desired.

Though we’re not seeing evidence of this yet, I do believe once the mobile sites become more common place – Google will deliver mobile versions of websites first when people are searching on a handset. It seems only natural. These forerunners, like James, will most likely benefit by being in the systems first.

For those of you who do have a mobile site created, make sure you’ve followed the steps in one of our previous blogs on optimising mobile websites.

Have a look at the NSDesign mobile site on your handset today to see just how simple and effective the navigation is.

If you’re interested in having a mobile version of your own site, then please get in touch with us today. We’d be only too happy to help!

* stat according to gomobi

We got our hands on an apple iPod touch this week…  NICE!!!  Finally a device that provides a half-decent browsing experience on a mobile device – compared to the others (we’ve used a few here over the years) the apple blows the rest away.

Using an adapted version of Safari, browsing websites is intuitive and on the whole fairly easy.  It’s instantly obvious that some websites “work” better than others, and it’s fair to say that websites built to standards (xhtml, css and semantic markup) perform better than the usual (non-accessible) tables-based layout sites. 

We’re really quite excited about this, and will be doing some more research in the new year to identify the “best practice” for optimising a website for the touch, and of course the iPhone.  With some clever browser detection and customised CSS, it should be possible to get any website (especially the ones we develop!) to format perfectly for the smaller ipod screen, with a few automatic extras to make browsing that bit easier…  watch this space!!