Since millions of people are starting to browse the web via their mobile phones, it may be a good idea to convert a mobile version of your website so that it functions better with mobile phones. We are going to look at five different solutions for converting your site into a mobile site.

The first one is Google Mobile Optimizer. It is a free tool, all you have to do is enter your URL, click Go, and Google will create a mobile version of your site. If you are looking for greater customization, lets take a look at some of the other players that offer more flexibility, but at a cost.

If you have an RSS Feed on your site, Mofuse may be a good choice. Mofuse also has features that allow you to customize pages, add your logo and track your mobile visitors.

Sign up to hear about the latest Mobile Marketing jobs at FoneGigs.com

Another option is Mobisite. Mobisite allows you to build websites that work across all mobile phones as they comply with all W3C’s mobile standards.

According to SuperWap, you don’t need any programming skills as their userface has a drag and drop feature to make things easy.

If you use Drupal, WordPress or Joomla to power your websites, Osmobi claimes to be the perfect solution.

Feel free to post a comment if you have any experience working with these solutions or recommend another one. If you’d like to share your experience, feel free to share your experience on our LinkedIn group.

Thanks!

Eric Melchor – Founder

on Twitter @FoneGigs

Mobile Marketing: Achieving Competitive Advantage Through Wireless Technology

The ads will be served on the American and Japanese homepages, search pages, and browse pages.

To learn more about advertising on mobile YouTube, visit youtube.com/advertise.

See examples of how ads will look on the mobile version of YouTube here.

Smaato ads respond in average 256 milliseconds

For the first time, response time of the top-performing ad networks is compared in the Smaato Metrics for January 2010. The response time is a significant consideration for mobile publishers concerned with the best user-experience in ad loading times.

read full story here.

Sports betting comes to iPhone

The service runs on the iPhone browser and delivers a live betting service based on Mfuse’s mobile provisioning and transaction technology.

It provides the majority of the functionality found in an online sportsbook, including complex bet types, in-running betting and credit/debit card deposit and withdrawals.

The browser-based app connects initially to Ladbrokes and William Hill, with the remaining client base to follow.

Rick Brownlow, biz dev director of Mfuse, said: “Our new web apps will provide the iPhone community with a host of betting and gaming applications which are unavailable through the current App Store.

“Mfuse is continuing its research and development in order to remain at the forefront of mobile technology and further establish itself in the smart phone market.”

Amazon Fastest Mobile Retail Site, Target Slowest

It’s no surprise that accessing the Web is typically slower on a mobile phone than on the desktop. But some mobile sites are slower than others. With that in mind, Web research firm Gomez this month compared the mobile Web performance of more than a dozen large retailers as the holiday shopping season gets underway.

Of the 14 stores tested, Amazon’s mobile site loaded the fastest at 2.8 seconds, followed by QVC (2.9), Newegg (3.3), and Overstock and Best Buy (both at about 3.4). Bringing up the rear were Sears (6 seconds), Buy.com (6.2) and Target (7).

The average load time was 4.7 seconds — 50% slower than that of the top retailers’ traditional Web sites.

The same three companies (in the same order) also had the most reliable mobile sites, with each accessible more than 99.5% of the time. Finishing at the bottom were Buy.com (95.5%), Sears (96.3%) and 1-800-Flowers (97.7%). The average uptime rate of 98.7% was a percentage point below the retailers’ main sites.

Gomez conducted the test between Nov. 1 and Nov. 15 across different locations and different wireless operators, but all on a Motorola Razr.

“This holiday season will be the first true test of the performance of retailers’ mobile sites,” said Matt Poepsel, vice president of performance strategies at Gomez, a division of Compuware Corp., in a statement. He added that the wide disparity in results “highlights that many retailers have more work to do to improve their mobile Web performance or risk losing a potential slice of the holiday action.”

And people are not necessarily more patient on cell phones. A recent Gomez survey of 1,000 mobile Web users found that they expect sites to load as quickly or more rapidly on handheld devices compared to their home or work computer. Why they would have such high expectations for the mobile Web is unclear.

The same study also revealed that two out of three people have had trouble accessing mobile sites, with slow load times the chief complaint. Eighty-five percent will only retry a mobile Web site twice if it does not work initially, and 40% would likely visit a competitor’s site instead.

Had the survey of mobile retail sites been conducted on a smartphone rather than a feature phone like the Razr, the results may have been better. A study by Nielsen Norman Group earlier this year found that people with higher-end devices were more likely to complete mobile Web tasks than those with regular phones.

see article here.

via MobiThinking

There are some valuable lessons to be learned from Yankee Group’s most recent assessment of the top US (mostly) mobile sites. Of the 26 news, search, sports (among the more popular categories for mobile surfing – see stats below) and carrier sites evaluated, it’s surprising to see only Google, Yahoo and Major League Baseball receiving a pass grade of 70+ out of 100, while Yankee found that many otherwise respected sites still show room for improvement. The average score was 52. The US national carriers’ public mobile sites – with the exception of Sprint – received particularly low scores, which would be a turn off to potential customers (who don’t have access to subscriber-only sites).
Whether or not you agree with Yankee’s assessment of these destinations, every mobile site can benefit from the tips drawn from the study and should ask themselves the 25 best-practice questions Yankee asks as it evaluates each site.

The Best of the Anywhere Web report can be purchased here.

Statistics:
• More than 2 million mobile Web domains in use today;
• 31 percent of mobile phone-owning consumers now browse the mobile Web at least once a month;
• Asked what sites they visited on their mobiles, most popular responses were: general news or information (26 percent); search sites (26 percent); weather (25 percent).

read full article here.