Mobile isn’t exactly a NEW media trend, but it’s certainly gaining more importance than it did a few years ago
According to Gizmag.com and Mobile Intelligence data, one in every two people now have a mobile phone, and “between January 2001, and December 2010 (a decade), our global society will have transformed from one where 13% of carried a mobile phone, to one where 70% carry one”. [source: Gizmag.com]
If you want to see how your site looks on a mobile phone, take half a minute to check out Google’s Conversion Utility.
Not looking so hot? There are quite a few tools on the web that can help your convert your site into a mobile-friendly interface.
- Mofuse is the choice of over 23,000 blogs, including HarvardBusiness.org and other publishers. It offers a platform tool for multiple devices including iPhone. This is a paid product, however, and monthly plans go from $39 to $199 a month which includes analytics and custon ad-server integration. They also a offer a free wordpress plugin.
- Firefox’s Web Developer extension disables images, JavaScript, and CSS to let you know the barebones of what your site will look like on less sophisticated browsing devices.
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- Phone emulators are available by from mobile phone manufacturers. Sony Ericsson provides publishers with their Developer World while Nokia has a developer forum with an XHTML section.
- Device Capture, brought to you by Browser Cam is a paid solution that allows you to test your website on Blackberry.
- Device Central is an option for those that own Adobe’s CS3 or CS4 suite.
- WordPress plugins (for those of us on WordPress) are available that will automatically convert your site into a more mobile-friendly format. Among the many plugins available, some well-liked ones are WordPress Mobile Edition and WordPress PDA & iPhone.
- Winksite is driven my RSS deployment like most other tools, but also offers community features such as forums, chat, and polls and allows Google Mobile Adsense.
- MobiSiteGalore is a free service that’s W3C compliant and should work across all mobile phones.
Whatever option you do decide to choose for your website, we’d recommend that your mobile version is as clean and neat as your online version. Some converters may give you a quick fix of turning your site into an RSS feed that’s easier to digest, but not necessarily easier to read. We’d recommend getting a demo beforehand.
And while we’re talking, how many of you read blogs on your mobile device? Or do you use a feed reader instead to more easily digest the content?
