There's a New Mobile Site in Town

Published on Sep 21, 2009 by Derek Eder | Category: mobile | 0 comments

Last month, we launched our first dedicated mobile site for the Council of Real Estate Brokerage Managers (CRB). The request started with a client's Board member asking for an "iPhone app," and eventually evolved into an open ended "mobile something" request to us. Having never done much with mobile sites before (other than making our XHTML/CSS mobile-friendly), we quickly jumped on the new challenge.

What would be our approach? Do we create a phone specific application, and if so, for what platform? The iPhone and Blackberry have the top market shares, but would one be easier to develop on than the other? We'd heard that Research in Motion, the creators of the Blackberry, had some .NET development tools already, but what about the iPhone? (Note: Mono appears to be running on the iPhone now.) Even further, what about Android phones and even the Palm Pre? We realized that creating an application on just one platform was too limiting, and creating the same thing on several was not within our budget or time frame. The solution had to be a mobile site.

Now that the platform had been decided, the next step was to decide what content to include on the mobile site. A quick look at Google Analytics indicated the most frequented sections were the course calendar and member directory. These areas far and away generated the most traffic and were also updated the most often, so we started with those. When designing mobile sites, there isn't much room for displaying a lot of different content. The goal is to allow visitors to quickly find the information they want without any other distractions.

Course calendar

The calendar displays courses for maintaining certification as a CRB and is updated frequently. A simplified agenda-style interface was designed, displaying upcoming events in a way that allowed clicking/tapping anywhere on each event to take the visitor to the landing page with all the pertinent details—as is expected on modern mobile sites.

Member directory

The member directory on the main CRB site consisted of six criteria including name, company, city, state, and chapter affiliation. After some research with Google analytics, we found that 85% of users were searching just on the name or state fields. This made pairing down the complexity of the mobile search a cinch: name and location (a combination of the state and country fields). Similar to the calendar, the results page consisted of large, easy-to-tap links leading to a simplified landing page.

Compatibility

After we decided on an approach and content, building the site was the next challenge. Ideally, we would have made a separate site for each type of mobile phone—feature phones (tiny screens and numeric keypads), smartphones (mid-size screens and QWERTY keypads), and touch-phones (iPhone, Android)—as outlined in Nielsen's latest mobile report, Usability of Mobile Websites, however the budget and time frame encouraged us to think creatively.

The end result was a hybrid site compatible with all three types of phones. We had to make some sacrifices in semantic markup but the big challenge was finding out which styles worked in which devices. Touch-phones are fairly straightforward because they have the equivalent of a regular browser in them. The most common feature phones and smartphones have low support for styles so we developed a few clever workarounds. We're looking forward to the day when touch-phones are the majority.

Since its launch, the site has been getting a healthy dose of mobile traffic, most of it from iPhones. We're using Google Analytics to track usage for phones that have JavaScript enabled and experimenting with Percent Mobile to track all other types of phones. As more and more smart phones come to market, and more and more users adopt them, one day the mobile site traffic may rival the traffic of its parent site! 

Like the mobile site we created or have some feedback?