Mobile Web Tipping Point
If you take a look back at the history of the web, it’s very clear that there was a tipping point; a moment where websites gained critical mass and the perception of them changed from something that was a bit of a novelty marketing tool to something that provided real value and more importantly the website became a tool which delivered leads and customers.
Once big businesses started taking notice of what the early adopters were doing with html, they soon started to create websites for themselves. Seeing how big blue chip businesses all had sites, the adoption grew amongst smaller and smaller businesses until even the smallest mom and pop shop had their own place in cyberspace.
It would seem that this adoption is something that we are now seeing with mobile websites. Most big businesses now have or are developing a mobile site to react to the growing use of mobile devices to browse the net.
Using mobile devices is no longer something that we just do on the move; today alone I have read and replied to email, checked movie times, grabbed a voucher code and booked a restaurant, all while sat on the sofa and all from my phone. All the sites that I visited were quick to load and most importantly all optimised for mobile devices.
While I could have switched on my laptop and done it all using that but by the time it would have booted up logged me in, I could have done most of the tasks that I needed to do.
It is this ability to swiftly gather information quickly and conveniently which is helping to power the growth of using mobile technology as an internet browsing device. In August 2011, mobile browsing represented 7.1% of all worldwide web browsing activity and this number is growing consistently month after month and with forecast models showing that by 2014 around 80% of us will use a mobile device to browse for information then we all need to take a look at how our sites function when shown on a mobile device.
You only have to take a quick glance at phone retailer to see that over 90% of mobile phones on the market come with a built in web browser; it is this demand for smartphones that is fuelling the growth in mobile web browsing.
It’s fair to say that the boom in mobile technology is reaching that tipping point and we should all start to get ready to create a mobile optimised version of our website.
