Digital Strategy, Design and Development
Digital Strategy, Design and Development
A question I was recently asked was along the lines of “Why bother producing mobile sites? Why not just leave it to software like Opera Mini?”. Opera Mini and other similar browsers are transcoders. Basically they take a desktop web site send it off to some servers, analyse the code and reformat it so that it looks better on devices like mobile phones. Opera have had considerable success with this and its a good question “why bother” when tools like this are available. My answer is it depends on what you are trying to do.
When you rely on a transcoder to deal with your website on the mobile side you are surrending your mobile web presence to a third party over which you will have little control. Transcoders generally work best with sites that are well built (i.e. the code behind the web page the user sees is well made using best practices in web development), they won’t fix mistakes for you or optimise the original code and may emphasise others. Additionally if you use lots of different technologies on your web pages (e.g. video, flash, audio etc.) then users on mobile devices may run into problems with those features.
So if your site is straightforward and simple it may well transfer well via a transcoder but anything with high complexity might run into problems, especially if the underlying code is problematic. In this case you might want to consider a specific mobile version of your site. Companies with complex desktop/laptop web 2.0 presences such as Facebook, Flickr and Youtube all have mobile versions of their sites, which offer fit-for-purpose experience for users. So in the case of Flickr the mobile version resizes images on the server side so the client does not waste bandwidth (and money) downloading large images they cannot see all of anyway. Also, a lot of features such as the image editor are unavaiable on the mobile version presumably because they won’t work with mobile devices and/or are not usable on these devices. This is not a lesser experience but a bespoke one.
Devices like the Iphone of course claim to access the entire web (and in theory can – but so can many others) but users will still have to experience the latency issues (potential slow download) of content designed for large screens being sent to a small screen devices on a slower connection. So whilst a user waits for your large desktop content to be downloaded to their small screen devices they may have given up and gone to someone offering them a much faster optimised experience.
When considering a mobile web strategy each organisation needs to decide how important the mobile web is and what they want users to access on it. Transcoders have their role to play but for organisations that want to succeed then reliance on them will always be a well thought out decision, especially for those wanting to make the use of Web 2.0 technologies.
