It’s not enough to be online these days, you need to be online and mobile! Increasing amounts of web traffic are now coming from new generation mobile phones, or smartphones, Apple’s iPhone being one of the most popular.

Mobile Web

The best solution for your online business is to have a site designed for the desktop/laptop and a separate one designed for the mobile. The appropriate one should be picked up by the browser being used. In this way, a WAP enabled site can be used for the older mobile phones and a site optimised for the small screen can be picked up by the newer Smartphones. See the difference between www.rte.ie and m.rte.ie   Or the difference between www.gmail.com and m.gmail.com.

The .mobi top level domain names can now be used for mobile sites. While there is no specific technology required, the aim is to have .mobi sites optimised for mobile browsing and user experiences should be consistent with guidelines. Critics of the .mobi approach point to the overhead involved in maintaining 2 different sites, and to the more fundamental issue of breaking from the device-independent nature of the web up to now.

Alternatively, there are other technical solutions which can render the screen to a small size eg. Opera Mobile. However, these may still be loading/accessing the full web page and so may not be so well optimised in terms of load time.

You can get a scoring for how your site will perform on a smartphone by going to ready.mobi.

Some tips for design for mobile include:

• Avoid specific image sizing and use percentage and relative measures such as em, ex, bolder, larger and thick.
• Keep pages short.
• Keep images small (for quick load time).

Apps

Then, when it comes to Apps, the question is how an app could be developed which could fulfil some ‘need’ or ‘desire’ in your customers. App development is not cheap, but will become more competitive as people enter the market. So, is there a business case for you for developing an app?

There was for payment gateway, Worldnet TPS, who have answered the ‘call to innovate’  and have just launched the first app which turns an iPhone into a virtual credit card terminal. The app allows businesses to accept secure card payment transactions through their iPhone and it is now available on iTunes.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0312/1224266101298.html

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