Renown web usability expert Jakob Nielsen has released a mobile web usability report which says exactly what many .mobi investors have been saying for a long time — mobile web users have different needs and while a walled garden approach is both unnecessary and far from ideal, the mobile web experience still suffers when websites are not designed with cell phones and smartphones in mind. Unsurprisingly, mobile web usability is reported to suffer most on cell phones with smaller screens and/or lower resolutions, agreeing with the conclusion many domainers have already reached that the iPhone and a few other premium smartphones provide a good mobile web experience, whereas mid-range and entry level cell phones provide a mediocre web browsing experience at best.

For a list of mobile web best practices, visit Mobiforge. While some content on Mobiforge (and elsewhere) discuss using .mobi domains for mobile web development, you can of course make a mobile compatible website out of any domain. I’m not going to get into the debate about whether you should choose m-dot, .wap, /mobile, .mobi — there’s enough reading on Namepros in the Dotmobi forum to keep anyone interested busy for many weeks. The short answer is what I said above — you can develop any domain into a mobile compatible website and you can identify your website as being mobile compatible however you want. 

The mobile web is still in it’s infancy — it’s big winners will be those with sites which go beyond being just mobile compatible and actually are mobile-friendly. Like I said at the start of this article, mobile web users are generally looking for different things online than those browsing the web on desktops or laptops/netbooks. Websites which are merely resized to fit the devices used by mobile web users are missing the whole point of why content was resized in the first place — it’s all about mobile web usability and aside from physical size limitations, one must also consider that most people don’t plan to spend hours browsing websites on a cell phone as they may on a desktop. What this means is that your 3000 word thesis of a blog post best be summarized, site navigation simplified allowing access  to each page on your website in the least amount of clicks possible, graphics and/or other bandwidth intensive media should be reduced in size, quality, or removed entirely, etc — I provided the Mobiforge link above for those who’d like to learn more about Best Practices when developing mobile compatible websites.

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