Having climbed on board the mobile revolution back in January with the purchase of the awesome Google Nexus S mobile phone, one thing which has hit me right between the eyes is just how hard it is to browse websites and make e-commerce transactions through a mobile phone.
Try buying a book on Amazon through your mobile browser: I did, and by the time I’d unpinched my fingers across the screen, slid the screen sideways and downwards, clicked on the web form, logged in, completed my purchase and pressed “Purchase” I felt like I’d run half a marathon!
Then I decided to download the Amazon App from the Android market and I completed my next purchase thru their app. The difference was obvious & immediate: The user experiences as different as taste testing Galaxy against Morrison’s cooking chocolate…
So I’ve been wondering "Is the website is dead??" RIP! Are Apps the future? Maybe…. But there are many thousands of small and mid sized companies whose website has never seen the inside of a mobile browser: Do they have to “ditch everything and start again” by developing iphone apps & android apps? Or is there a less painful evolutionary way ahead?
Developing a “mobile site” is going to be a great solution for many small and medium sized businesses. I’ve just implemented a mobile site on my website, and although the outcome isn’t perfect, it’s a good start to thinking about how my business is going to exist in a mobile world.
The worldwide community that is Drupal.org never ceases to impress; I’ve been using their Content Management System for a couple of years now, and whenever I’ve had a website challenge you can be sure that “Drupal has a module for that…”
I chose to implement Drupal Mobile Tools (http://drupal.org/project/mobile_tools ) and in half a day Voila! my website at primecloud.co.uk now detects whether the visitor is coming in through a mobile device (iphone, ipad, ipod, android or blackberry) or mobile browser (Opera Mini) , and redirects them to a mobile theme which strips out all the fluffy design, banners and optional goodies (Twitter, Online Chat etc) and presents the visitor clearly with the main content of each page. Simples!
And what have I learnt so far?
- That a website already built in a content management system like Drupal is a great platform on which to add mobile functionality – it’s certainly a lot easier and less time consuming than if I was starting from a raw html site.
- That in html terms, I realised that I had to to separate the “content” from the “presentation”. Ie. The same content is being displayed through both the main site and through the mobile site, but the presentation of that content is very different. If I’ve lost you, take a look at http://bbc.co.uk/news and then look at the same page through a mobile browser: http://bbc.co.uk/news/mobile : Same news – but completely different presentation.
- That Drupal Mobile Tools works just fine (if not a bit tricky to learn) , but I had to experiment with 3 or 4 different mobile themes before settling on using the Drupal .mobi theme (http://drupal.org/project/mobi ) the main reason being that it supports “Content” blocks, so that I could control which blocks are displayed on which page ( ie. back to separating “Presentation” from “Content”)
So "Thank You" Drupal, and "Hello" mobile world. Now my website is mobile I am already thinking about a "mark 2" to better integrate it with the inbuilt features of my mobile phone: There are "microformats" to be able to add contact details from the website directly into the address book, play with geo-tagging & Google Maps and HTML5 to get my brain around...
