Beyond transcoding - getting sites right for mobile search

Mobile search is about finding things out on the web from a mobile phone, and the "receiving end" of that is the actual site and the experience is viewing the mobile site.

Optimizing sites for mobile is in its infancy in the US, and in most places outside Japan and Korea. DoCoMo in Japan skipped the whole problem because it declined to adopt the WAP standard for mobile webites, even though WAP was designed by its bretheren global carriers.  But rightly the DoCoMo i-mode team recognised that that (that it was designed by telecoms engineers) would be its downfall as a consumer experience and instead make the toally radical decision to opt for their own cut-down version of HTML which they called C-HTML.

These days i-mode sites will cope with XHTML and all the latest.  But that original decision had enormous ramifications. For one thing the average coding time for web developers was cut by 60% compared to WAP, for another web designers and developers needed no retraining, and for another the sites could be viewed and tested and fine-tuned in a browser.

One result is that for i-mode in Japan today DoCoMo has about 10,000 "approved and official" i-mode sites - those linked into the official menu and provided with intergated billing - and more than 100,000 unofficial sites.  The unofficial sites are any person, group or organisation who wants to write a web site for mobile, and about 50% of those are commercial.  That's a massive ecosystem created by that smart decision up-front in 1998.

Back to today, Webpronews Search Insider has an article on how to finetune your site for mobile, and some good tips.  There's no rocket science but it is an easy read, and worth a glance if you're new to mobile web site optimisation.

Is there a mobile search item that you think we should feature? Email tips@goobile.com. Thanks!

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Call, for strategy, business and partnering advice. | | Email Walter Adamson | Call (Australia) +61 403 345 632.