Yesterday News Limited's digital arm launched a mobile version of their primary news portal, at m.news.com.au.
This is the second mobile version of a News Limited site in Australia launched in recent months, following the mobile version of CarsGuide going live at carsguide.mobi.
It's an indicator of the embyronic nature of the space that there's no single expected format for a mobile URL, even within the same corporation. I'd tend to place my bets for the moment on 'm.companyname.com' - mainly because it's used by what's becoming a central driver of people towards using the mobile web (I know a few people who use it and would never have considered using the mobile web before), which is m.facebook.com.
The .mobi domains (along with .info and .biz) may have limited value (except of course to Domain Registrars) as when all's said and done a '.com' on the end of your domain name is expected by a broad range of the audience.. just as 'www' is expected at the front.
Will the emergence of M-sites lead to an expectation of an 'm' prefix for the mobile version of any website, in the same vein of the service prefixes of a decade or so ago? (telnet.yoursite.com, gopher.yoursite.com, etc.) Only time will tell.
Indeed, the use of a separate hostname may merely be another indicator of the age of the medium -- Elise Kendall points out that advertising a separate URL for mobile devices highlights that a company has a mobile site at all; it's certainly not taken for granted yet that they would. Remember the time when webmasters would go to the extent of producing their site once for IE, and once for Netscape... and sometimes at slightly different addresses?
There are certainly disadvantages in keeping your mobile site on a different address. In the News.com.au article linked to above, they've got a picture of an HTC TyTn of some variety (branded in Australia as either a Dopod 838pro -- which nearly all of us here in the office use -- or the iMate JasJam) viewing the mobile news site.
If I pick up my 838pro, and enter 'www.news.com.au' into Internet Explorer, I'm presented with (after a download of 630kb -- which could cost up to $0.80 in some situations) an indecipherable soup of mangled page fragments; It would be nice if at very least I was given a link to the mobile site if not automatically redirected to it.
m.news.com.au, to their credit, is a much more manageable 31kb, utterly readable, and looks great. I'm sure it'd look even better after personalisation.. but what happens if I stumble upon a mobile URL from a desktop computer? This is what happens. It's readable, yes, but formatted for the wrong media, and once again, I'm not even given a link to the desktop version, or (which would be even better) redirected.
It could be a result of the software driving m.news.com.au being separate to the software driving news.com.au, but it remains a usability issue.. once Google starts indexing the mobile site it could return the mobile results in desktop searches (Appropriate MIME type and DOCTYPE for mobile output doesn't necessarily prevent them from doing this).
The mobile web (or m-site) space is evolving rapidly. Successful entrants into the space keep simplicity at the forefront of their mind.
Studies show that mobile users are after the stripped down bare essentials of what they'd use their desktop for, plus a few things it might be less practical to use a desktop for, e.g:
The second study linked above indicates that consumers aren't ready for "Web 2.0" in the mobile space yet. Side-stepping the difficulty in defining what "Web 2.0" might mean in that context, it's not just consumers who aren't ready - many of the core technologies of Web 2.0 are either unavailable (AJAX) or impractical (Video Streaming) on mobile devices.
In short, a Mobile site should look and behave very much like a well-designed "Web 1.0" site of eight to ten years ago, with no flashy animation, bandwidth-eating graphics or video, but should be optimised under the hood to conform to WAP 2.0 / XHTML Mobile Profile (some gadgets won't display content that doesn't validate!) and use the absolute minimum CSS possible. m.news.com.au is only 31kb, and their desktop site is over 600! 30-50kb is a good benchmark for the maximum size (including all images and CSS) that a mobile site should be.
As for what hostname they should sit on, that's something only time will tell. m.yourcompany.com may be a winner, but whatever you do, make sure that mobile visitors to your desktop site are redirected to the alternative (or given a link), and desktop visitors to your mobile site likewise. If you can keep the two functions on the same hostname, even better - it'll make for a less cluttered business card, and less explaining to do.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
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