Some people still don’t understand that Facebook is not their own personal website. Today, for example, someone asked this question on LinkedIn:
Will Facebook Fan Pages eventually replace websites? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each platform for a business?
Facebook Fan Pages will not replace websites for savvy marketers. Facebook, although it looks to be the entire internet for some people, is just a single site.
Here’s the basic question you want to ask: who owns your data? If you run your own domain name, and your own permission-based email list and/or your own mobile marketing shortcode database, you do. If you rely on Facebook, you don’t.
Facebook was down for an hour or so last week. I wasn’t able to message any of my contacts there. Fortunately, I also had their email addresses and phone numbers, so it wasn’t a total loss. However, had I relied solely on Facebook, my database would’ve been unavailable. For people who have had their accounts disabled, it’s game over.
Depending on the business you are in, you will also find that a large number of your customers will not even have Facebook accounts, despite the popularity of the site.
From a developer standpoint the back end code of Facebook itself is changing from FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to frames. Did that set off any red flags, mobile developers? It should. Frames are not supported on many phones, so this is going to be a problem that takes a lot of companies by surprise. So, it’s my educated guess that they are going to switch back when everyone starts complaining, resulting in more time and money spent on development (not that there’s anything wrong with that for developers, but for business owners, that’s another story).
Facebook pages are great for a secondary communication channel, and if you are running Facebook Ads, it’s good to have a page within FB for a landing page. It has great value in the search engines. But, it is not “yours” and the minute we forget that is the minute we risk losing our position in the marketplace.
Cutting Edge Mobile Design
The mobile web is officially open to the masses, as evidenced by all the mobile sessions at this year’s South by Southwest Party Conference. Plain old-fashioned WAP design is out. It’s time to step up the game on creating striking, captivating, eye-catching mobile design.
Need inspiration? Here are some mobile design showcases to get you going. These links are all desktop sites with rich graphics, so if you’re reading this on your mobile phone, consider yourself warned about huge graphic download sizes if you don’t have an unlimited data plan:
Mobile Design Showcase Sites That Rock
- MobileAwesomeness.com The name says it all, doesn’t it?
- SmashingMagazine.com‘s mobile design trends. Stay on SmashingMagazine.com for awhile, because it has all kinds of free downloads for icons, fonts, graphics, textures, tutorials, and WordPress themes. It’s a designer’s dream site.
- Mashable.com’s mobile web design post
If you’d rather have a how-to manual, Nokia has produced a comprehensive mobile visual design guide for newcomers on their forum, Forum.Nokia.com. They also have mobile web templates and code that you are welcome to use at will, provided you follow the very generous terms of their license agreement.
Go develop, and tell us what you made.
A message from mobiEnthusiast.mobi
Blogging as mobiEnthusiast, I’ve been nominated for a Champions in New Media Award for Blogger of the Year. Would you please vote for me? You don’t have to register or login or do any of that, just click the arrow next to my picture. When the arrow turns green, your vote counts. Comments are optional but appreciated. Voting ends 24 March 2010, so please vote now while it’s fresh in your mind. Thank you, thank you, and thank you!
– Holly
Note: this is a revision of the original post which was deleted at the site owner’s request. This post was re-created with a different site than yesterday’s post.
Via Twitter, I was asked a question that is on a lot of mobi Enthusiast readers’ minds: “I have a site that is NOT mobile friendly and I want it to be – suggestions?”
The Challenge of Making a Computer Website Mobile-Friendly
To answer the question, let’s look at some of the reasons a website is not mobile friendly, and in the process you’ll want to do the opposite to get the ball rolling. Thanks to Jay Ehret’s mobile web podcast we have a number of small business owners and marketing people joining us, so I will keep this as non-techie as I can. (Thanks again, Jay!)
Those of you who are reading on a computer can follow along and check out this site, but if you have a phone other than an iPhone, wait until you are on a computer instead because this site is going to jam your phone browser for sure: sibmira.com.
Look around: The site is an example of a professional theme on a dark gray background. It has graphical links across the top, a large photo of hands holding the world, and several small graphics and photos of people in business suits looking at mobile phones. Don’t let the small size of the photos fool you – they average 20 kb each in file size (also known as weight). There isn’t much text on the site.
Next, let’s take a look at the site on ready.mobi. Ready.mobi is a site that analyzes a given website for how mobile friendly it is. Here’s the bad news: Not only does the phone emulator on ready.mobi show a full screen of dark gray, but our example site scores the lowest possible, a 1 out of 5, and receives this message: “It will definitely display very poorly on a mobile phone. Your mobi.readiness score is calculated from the results displayed below. Failing tests and large page sizes both lower the score.”
Not only did it score a 1/5, it has 9 code compliance failures for a mobile site. The worst offenses for this site are: it uses tables for structure, it has large file sizes for graphics, and it uses nested tables. It could be a lot worse. Other sites have fails which include using pop up windows, form submit buttons, and iframes.
Next, let’s take a look at what the site would look like if it were transcoded, or recoded for use on a phone as-is. Go to mowser.mobi and type in your site. Well, you don’t have to, I did it for you already. Here are the results. Sibmira transcoded by mowser. Now the site looks long and skinny, and it might load on a mobile phone, but then again it might not. Using mowser.mobi the pieces of the table used to create the structure are stacked on top of each other. It’s not very attractive, is it? It has a lot of gray blocks and pictures sprinkled randomly across the screen. The pictures are still too large and too heavy, meaning the file size is too large. In my experience, I do better with graphics if I keep them under 10 kb. People without unlimited internet plans are paying to download these graphics and are waiting for them to load. Phone internet users aren’t a patient lot, so you want these graphics to load practically instantly.
Think about your site. Is this how you want it to look? Other sites with fewer graphics show up with a lot of text and a lot of scrolling down. With mobile internet sites, it’s important to distill your information down to the smallest bites and serve those to your users.
Those of you on a mobile phone can see that this post is probably making your wrists hurt from all the scrolling down to read your long, skinny web page.
As a side note, the site we profiled is owned by a developer friend of mine who is adept at making mobile sites. He also owns the name sibmira.mobi and has it reserved to make a mobile site at a later date, which is also a good practice.
This is a first look to get you started. Take a look at your own site on ready.mobi and mowser.mobi to see what you will need to do differently when designing your own mobile site.
So, until next time, think about about the smallest screen. Don’t try to cram every little detail you can about your company on there – people will just leave. Make sure the graphics fit. Think about how much (or how little) reading you would want to do if you were visiting the site. Then edit, edit, edit.
