What is a Webile and Why Should You Care?

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Webile is a website that is specially formatted for mobile access. It is pretty common knowledge now that the Internet is going mobile. More and more peole are buying smartphones – in fact, the simplest of the mobiles have some kind of browsing support built in.

These phones give the power to the users to access information on the go. Now they don’t have to look for the nearest desktop or locate a cyber-cafe when they need to search for information. They can locate the desired product and service sellers from a Google search on their phones.

Where does this leave you, a website owner and marketer who is trying to get hot leads and sales? Your regular website will not be clearly visible on his tiny screen – even a large 3.5″ iPhone screen is tiny compared to the 15″ and bigger desktop screens – and he will bail out quicker than he got in.

You need a specially formatted site that displays compact information about your products, services and offers to the mobile user and gets him to call you or submit a quote request. He or she should be able to do this easily and quickly – mobile users are an impatient lot. You need a webile.

And you can order your webile here. Do it before you get distracted and lose this opportunity to tap into this vast market.

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Marketing SaaS? Offer Mobile Access To Get Major Advantage

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If you are offering Software As A Service, offering mobile access can help you open up a vast new market and get many new subscribers. Here’s how:

When you are marketing Software as a Service (SaaS), getting new subscribers and retaining the existing users for longer periods is a challenge. You can only recover your costs and make profit if you have a large subscriber base that sticks with you for several months, even years. You also need to regularly sign up new users as some of them are going to fall off anyway.

An interesting idea that you can explore is to offer access to your software from a mobile device. Since a large number of users have smartphones like iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones, and are constantly on the move, if they can access your software from their phones, their loyalty is going to increase manifold. They committed their important data to your service – now allow them access from anywhere so that they do not have to carry their heavy laptops or search around for cyber-cafes (the cyber-cafe access fees at almost all hotels is exorbitant to say the least).

Some software do things that are not conducive to access from the small screen phones. Don’t get disheartened. You can plan to at least show them a limited view of the data from their phone so that they can stay updated and tackle the critical part of their work at least.

Similarly allowing them to subscribe to alerts that are texted to them when important changes occur (called exception situations in corporatespeak) will again put them at a major advantage. If you take good care of your users, they take good care your business.

So plan and implement mobile access for some areas of your software, let them know and see your business grow. We can help – check our mobile application development services here.

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Mobile Websites Case Study: Safestyle UK

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Safestyle UK is a leading double glazing and uPVC doors company in Britain. We recently developed their mobile website to target the increasing number of people searching for products with their mobile phones. This mobile website mainly focussed on providing the key benefit statement and showcase their entire product range along with the current offer.

Every page has a strong call-to-action that drives the interested visitors to a page where they can request a FREE quote. The design of the different pages has been deliberately kept simple to highlight the functionality.

The statistics show that the mobile version is already drawing almost 5% of the visitors and is generating a healthy number of leads daily – clearly demonstrating that UK based users have adopted the mobiles quite extensively.

You can visit the mobile site by typing www.safestyle-windows.co.uk (you will be redirected to the mobile version automatically) on your phone. You can also scan the QR code on the right if you have a bar code scanner software installed.

If you are thinking of getting a compact and efficient mobile website or web application for mobile access, designed for your business, drop over here. You can rest assured of a professional and responsive service.

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Effective Mobile Websites – How To

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Did you notice that mobile phones have become iconic devices with the proliferation of iPhones, Android phones and Blackberries? They have gathered a critical mass now and an increasing number of people are searching for information and resources on the Internet with their mobiles.

How do you tap this vast potential market? A mobile website is the answer. Get one designed as soon as possible. The competition for attention in the smartphone segment is still manageable now, but will become worse as the days pass by.

Here are 15 tips for a great mobile website:

  1. The mobile phones have much smaller screen space and therefore you need to cut down on the amount of information that you can include in the mobile pages.
  2. The phones work on much slower bandwidth even if they are on 3G. Your site loads much faster if you have smaller files, few and compact graphics and other elements.
  3. Since the capacity of the phones vary widely, use progressive enhancement. This way you will have your site working fine off the most limited browsers but show up really great with the more capable browsers and phones.
  4. Attention span on a mobile site is really limited. Include your most salient points – the big hitters –and do not try to tell everything and confuse the reader.
  5. You might try this format – powerful headline, a paragraph of introduction text and a few bullet points followed by a call to action.
  6. New page loads are taxing on the bandwidth, too much information on a single page is daunting. You have to strike a fine balance.
  7. Advertise on the mobile networks. The clicks are still affordable. You can also set up campaigns on Adwords (content display network) with mobiles as the selected target.
  8. Always send the clicks to a mobile version of the landing page. Don’t drop the ball by sending the clicks to a desktop landing page which won’t show up clearly on the small screens.
  9. Include a link to your main site so that they can see the whole story, if they are not happy with the limited information on the mobile site.
  10. Mobile commerce (pay from a mobile – Paypal and phone billing) is picking up very fast. Be ready to take advantage.
  11. Make your forms as small as possible. They can’t fill up large forms with the mobile keyboard.
  12. Hot tip: Include a touch-to-call or click-to-call button. They are working off a mobile phone after all and calling someone is the most natural thing to do.
  13. Build a SMS list. SMS marketing, like email marketing, is a potential winner. However you need to use it responsibly or else, you will go down the email spammer route.
  14. You must include a mobile sitemap and submit it to the search engines. How can we forget the search engines? They can send large number of people to your sites after all.
  15. Setup auto-sensing and auto-redirection for mobile browsers on the main URL. Don’t split your branding efforts by advertising 2 different URLs.

You can rest assured of massive success for your mobile websites and unlock a vast new market by following these tips. Please share your success report in the comments section below.

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Nasscom Emergeout on Mobile Internet

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I was at the Nasscom Emergeout conference on 25th August and loved to see the fantastic momentum that is building for the mobile Internet. Almost everyone was of the opinion that people are gravitating towards the mobile as the access device of choice to locate information and do different things that they need to do for business or pleasure.
This is in tune with my expectations. As I say it: “The mobile phone is the accessory that you take to the bedroom as well as the boardroom.” It is only logical that we will like to access information with the mobiles so that we can adapt our working and get habituated in operating a single device all the time.
A few important issues that fuel the growth of mobiles are:
  1. It can handle our voice call (cheap local traffic directly and international through VOIP).
  2. It can handle our text communication (SMS and emails).
  3. It has an in-built camera (for most of the handsets, may vary in resolution and features).
  4. It has an in-built browser (the usage convenience is proportional to teh screen size and data speed though).
  5. A large number of apps allowing you to handle different tasks, are already available and more are launched everyday.
  6. There is more than 5 times penetration of the mobiles as compared to the computers. I think we can bypass the computers and stick to mobile phones for automation in the rural areas where the users need to be updated about education, healthcare, government facilities and like. They are free to use computers when doing complex computational jobs like designing or database work in the offices.
I just carried my mobile phone on this Delhi trip. Never missed my laptop there. And I could even demonstrate the portfolio of the webiles (mobile websites that we are developing) to some prospects and friends.
While on this topic, I am happy to announce a very special 50% discount on a mobile website (regular price £200 or Rs 14000) for the Emerge 50 winners and 25% discount to all attendees. Please email me to avail of this fantastic opportunity to unlock the vast market that is opening up, for generating new business leads.

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Mobile Website Case Study: Kenilworth Hotels

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We recently completed the mobile website for a leading hotel of Kolkata and Goa – the Kenilworth Hotels. This is a star hotel and very renowned for its architectural beauty and historic significance.

We have included an easy to use navigation so that people can book rooms online from the mobile phone. They can also learn about the dining options and call the hotel by tapping a button to make reservations. The bar and the spa are covered too.

A special feature of the site is to reproduce the Last Minute Deal, which allows one to reserve rooms for the same day at a special price (when the deal is available).

Technically, the mobile site is connected to a backend database and draws the room and LMD information from there. It has also got the Google Analytics code integrated.

Check out the site by typing www.kenilworthhotels.com on your mobile browser.

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Use QR Codes to Promote Your Mobile Website

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When you are publicising your web site, it helps to put the QR code on your publicity material. This way, people who have a mobile phone with a camera and the right software can just point to the QR code and reach your website without having to type the URL.
But what is a QR Code?
The QR code is a special 2D image with the URL of the web site encoded in it. When the mobile phone camera points to it, the underlying software interpretes this as a URL and automatically loads the site in its browser window.
You can test it now. We have reproduced the QR code of our mobile site to the right. Just aim with your mobile camera and bingo – the site will load in your browser. Look ma – no typing!

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Touch to Call Phone Numbers

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When designing your mobile web site, you must remember that mobile users do not want to fill up forms (specially if they are long). They would rather call you for getting the required information. It also helps them avoid email follow ups later.
Therefore you must put touch-to-call phone numbers on your mobile web sites. These are simple images (showing a phone icon or even your phone number) with a link to tel:phone-number.
<a href=”tel:01274 792525″>Call 01274 792525</a>
Anyone browsing your site with a smartphone can just touch this icon and a dialler screen will open up with the number pre-loaded. One just dials your number by tapping the call key.

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Your blog on mobile

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While there are several nice-looking themes available for the desktop browsers, you have to consider how your blog looks when the visitor is using a mobile phone to check it out. As you know, a large number of people are now surfing the Internet with a smartphone and you definitely want these people to be able to consume the thoughtful blog posts. Don’t you?

Now you have an easy way out.  Just install the wptouch plugin to your blog and relax. This will add a new theme to your blog, making it look like and work like an iPhone application. This enables  the iPhone, Blackberry, Android and other mobile phones users to view your blog posts easily, while on the go.

We install and activate the wptouch plugin to WordPress blogs for a nominal $25 per blog. Just write to info @ webile.co.uk and we will get this done within 1 business day.

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Mobile Applications or Web Applications?

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Are you planning to create a mobile application for selling on the App store or marketing your product? Have you considered creating a web application for mobile access? Here are the relevant facts that you help you plan which way to go:

Mobile applications can be listed on the app stores like Apple iTunes store and Android store and these can get several users to download the application from there. This number can increase to a huge number if your application is liked by people and gets positive reviews. However you need to create separate apps for Apple iPhone and Android based devices.

If you want to target HTC, Samsung, Nokia and LG phones running Symbian OS, you need yet another version. Getting the people to download and try your app is the biggest challenge after you have created it.

Web applications on the other hand can be created once and be run on all the different devices. There are directories available where these applications can be listed. Also you don’t have to bother much about distributing upgrades as you can simply upgrade the copy on the web and everyone gets to use the latest version, the next time they access it.

The problem with web applications is that these do not integrate so well with the native OS of the device and therefore it is difficult to access the GPS or other internal settings of the device.

So choose your medium wisely. If your application needs to interact with the device internals and be available even when Net access is not there, you should create a native app. If you are trying to provide a service that needs Internet access anyway and you want to appeal to a broader segment, a web application may be the way to go.

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