Mobile landscape-the truth behind the hype

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This year, 2010, is apparently the year of the mobile. Any organisation dealing in digital media is talking about it, Wall Street analysts are lionising the potential and there are a growing number of major brands implementing their mobile strategy. Any international marketer worth their salt is plotting a course to get access to the pockets of the 4 billion mobile subscribers world-wide. Many organisations are now starting to meet the associated technology challenges head-on and this paper points the way for innovative brands to begin implementing high impact mobile initiatives immediately.

However, executing a mobile strategy today is an evolving process, and there are significant hurdles to overcome in constructing effective, broad-based, mobile initiatives. It is not just about delivering a new piece of technology (which is getting easier) but it is also about the application of that technology to the market you are addressing and how to get your customers embracing your mobile channel. Obviously, the need to create a compelling user experience is key to the success of your campaign. We have learned through painful experience that in reality your customers will try your mobile channel only once before deciding whether or not to give it 'general air-play'.

Why is 'going mobile' so hard? In short, the mobile medium has many different players from carriers to handset manufacturers to platforms to content publishers and many others. There are few standards for moving content across carriers to different mobile devices and it is still a little daunting for the uninitiated to navigate. Despite the noise and the 'explosive' growth of this market there are only a handful of suppliers that understand how to produce and publish rich, compelling, relevant and engaging content across the multiplicity of mobile device types now available.

The first obstacle to overcome exists in the form factor of mobile devices. Consumer expectations of the interactive media experience have been shaped by the Internet, and the Internet experience does not map directly to the small screen size and is limited by the bandwidth of the mobile environment. Mobile initiatives must be conceived and designed specifically to support a compelling mobile experience. Our experience to-date has been that this is uncharted territory for the vast majority of mobile brand strategies and has been characterised more by trials than by national and international rollouts.

The next challenge is that, unlike the open, standards-driven Internet, the mobile world is highly fragmented. There are currently more than 30 major handset manufacturers producing over 500 different phones, with significant variations in operating systems, screen sizes, display resolution, processing speed, memory, and performance. These differences mean that mobile content and applications must be adapted to run on multiple, dissimilar devices, greatly complicating the development effort. Further variations in service delivery among more than 600 carriers add still more development complications and cost. For these reasons, many mobile campaigns today are limited either to one carrier and a handful of devices, which compromises reach, or to the most basic of content technologies, which compromises effectiveness.

Perhaps the most important question that needs answering is: "Do you believe the hype and if so, is the timing right for me to 'go mobile' now?" If the answer to both is 'yes' the next question is "How will I gain competitive advantages comparable to those of pioneering web initiatives a decade ago?"

Given that the mobile market is in a constant state of flux and the noise level is constantly increasing - what are the possibilities open to an innovative brand?

There are five distinct tried and trusted methods for extending mobile initiatives to new audiences, which are described as follows in the chronological order of their entrance to the general market.

1. Text messaging via SMS has universal reach, and offers simplicity. It's also the most common non-voice use of mobile devices, accessed by anyone who texts friends and family or downloads ringtones and provides a solid delivery mechanism.

2. Rich content delivery via MMS (multimedia messaging service) delivers basic video, audio, and pictures in addition to text, and can be used for more colourful, animated enticements such as directions to a restaurant or a coupon for a film. SMS and MMS can team up, with SMS making the initial solicitation and MMS providing the delivery of rich content. On the downside, SMS/MMS offer very limited content delivery - only 160 characters. SMS, being text-only, can deliver just bare messages. While MMS adds basic multimedia, it and SMS share a further limitation in that they offer only two-way, walkie-talkie type communications. They are useful for alerting users to special offers and in following up offer acceptance by sending simple, static content. They do not provide an effective means to a brand experience and must also be used with caution; nobody likes receiving unwanted text messages on a mobile phone, or worse, getting stuck with usage charges.

3. The Mobile Web uses WAP (wireless application protocol) to access web sites. The WAP browser, which operates much like a computer-based browser but is simplified for the mobile environment, can deliver a much more satisfying user experience than SMS/MMS can, and is fully interactive. Mobile phones with browser capabilities are mainstream, and while usage is less common than SMS/MMS, approximately 75% of all mobile devices are Internet-enabled. What those users do with their WAP browsers differs markedly from their behaviour with computer browsers, as general web surfing on a mobile device just doesn't work well. There's no mouse, no proper keyboard, the connections are slower and web sites designed for computer access typically display awkwardly on small mobile screens. That makes the mobile web best suited to utilities that target specific audiences with tailored offerings. For example, an airline mobile service that displays flight status, schedule information, itineraries, and offers flight changes and check-in. In other words, delivering a limited portion of the content and functionality available at a brand's full web site, formatted specifically for handsets. Having identified an appropriate application, the challenge of accommodating variations among devices and carriers remains.

4. Downloadable rich media applications that support a variety of environments including Java, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone, are now hitting the headlines. These applications enable a far richer user experience than do SMS/MMS or mobile web, with the addition of high-quality video and audio and a higher level of contextual presentation, such as menu choices that make optimum use of screen real estate at any given point in the user experience. Creating compelling mobile applications requires significantly more that simply deciding what content to include and where to reformat the full web site and necessitates the creation of fresh content and interaction designed and optimized specifically for the mobile experience. Even though most phones are rich-media capable, few rich media device independent applications exist. For example, Apple now boasts that there are more than 100,000 iPhone Applications or Apps ( http://bit.ly/803DzU ) for this specific device - but it's highly unlikely that the vast majority of these will ever be ported to other handsets. That's largely a development issue and means that the proliferation of these applications cannot be ubiquitous unless they are developed for every single type of smart phone. Unlike in the computer world, a Java version that works on one mobile device doesn't necessarily work on other mobile devices. Given the proliferation of device-specific Java implementations, brands who choose to deliver rich media applications are often forced to choose which devices they'll support, in order to control development and testing costs.

5. Flash Lite is a runtime environment specifically optimized for mobile phones. Flash Lite enables OEMs and operators to differentiate their devices via customized user interfaces, a more complete web experience, and the ability to access video and mobile content across devices.

Now we have covered what is available we should consider how a brand should start to implement these technologies. Most brands that have embarked on their mobile strategy have often commenced their initiative with a marketing focus and have largely limited this activity to SMS/MMS campaigns, using them with the most basic user interaction. Those who have ventured further typically partner with a vendor offering either mobile web or rich media expertise. Because of the inherent technology bias, this risks letting technology drive the implementation, rather than business goals driving the implementation. Ideally, a brand wanting to optimize their efforts would be best served by partnering with a vendor that can support their strategic initiative with whichever technology is best suited to the task, combining multiple technologies to support different aspects of the mobile initiative when appropriate. It would be a bold move to commence an initiative using 'in-house' resources that have no track record of success and at this stage of the market development there are a small but growing number of suppliers who offer robust and reliable development platforms - not dissimilar to the early days of the internet. The prudent choice should be a vendor who has been in the market for some time with a demonstrable track record of delivering exponential growth from the mobile channel.

If you are seriously interested in divining and executing your mobile strategy you will be glad you made the decision because the sooner you get started with high-impact mobile campaigns, the sooner you'll have a serious competitive advantage in reaching those 4 billion global mobile phone subscribers.

In conclusion, there is now hard data ( http://bit.ly/4JJDq4 ) showing that the mobile internet is ramping up faster than desktop internet did. There currently exists an explosion in the growth of mobile data which is set to continue for some time. Mobile is here to stay and is only going to dwarf the first internet wave due to its ubiquity, necessity, convenience, and proximity to nearly everything we do.

Behind the mobile web site design is what does.

It cannot be denied almost all mobile phones. Rich, in fact, before the laptop is not common today lower than these gadgets cost in front of the cost. Is not mobile phone trend in the past, now that everyone has mobile phone.

Recognizing these cell phone companies and web site programmers what now wireless application protocol called has started. WAP as abbreviations, it's international standard mobile phones using is from a personal digital assistant or Internet access. WAP Mobile application is a computer web browser (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and atc. ) Is similar to remove some features to mobile phone standards-compliant.

WAP, mobile users can access services provided by various Web sites from a mobile phone. Download the music file, send e-mail to see the latest news report on major news sites, track news about your favorite sports events also on their mobile phones. Of might find navigate at all times, and sometimes as a boring around laptops carrying the businessman is very useful.

Using WAP site wireless markup language used to design websites for hyper text markup language, despite their similarity is created. Provides a web interface interface features such as WML navigation data entry form, hyperlinks, text, images, similar to HTML.

How does mobile Internet works

Mobile Internet access, computer-based cousin to work. This is to access the World Wide Web, a bridge or gateway to use. You are requesting a page, bridge Web from the page. These pages are then is converted to a form that is recognizable by reading mobile phone.

One of the great features of the mobile Internet can query specific Office phone number over the Web is. You can use the numeric value returned by the query call to your mobile phone saves hassle of dialing a number.

Process of building a website design and mobile

And design, how to build a mobile site to compare to conventional access from a desktop or laptop browser website design is almost no difference. However, it is important knowing these differences before you decide to tackle the task specific WAP browser in one website.

Takes the time to complete one designed mobile site, and compared to its desktop cousin. Because this is a different WAP access terminals for each phone model, are from each other. Terminal device, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, such as and the are different things. Its ancestor, HTML, even though the similarity of behaviour and appearance of the site was created by using their code compared to very different beasts, WML itself has a very strict specifications. Therefore, different ways of how to design and to build mobile sites for each of these specific phone model one find that.

To design a mobile site, mobile phone specific Authoring Kit is required. Mobile phone that supports XHTML standard in the beginning WAP content provider for specific pages to specific development kit is required. It is is a great contrast to design it, and one text editor and a browser designed only to test the page desktop access page.

Fortunately, WAP Authoring Kit offered Internet rich in May. These kits, one only must "create a mobile site Kit" to input, search engines, and would be rewarded by many hits or the search results. These results is the link to the WAP development of Kit you downloaded from the Web site you can.

How to build a mobile site, design a document information there too, available on the Internet. For example, mTLD training resources how to make your website while mobile phone Internet standards to comply with e-book that contains no host number.

You must outset that unlike traditional web site, WAP site, mobile phone itself to test. Takes the time to complete this design in building mobile sites computer-based web site compared to. Adapted to the mobile phones of today, but more often, XHTML, XML standards. Further, also a mobile phone emulator software to mimic the environment of the mobile phone can download from the Internet. Mobile web designer uses these emulators can speed up the testing of their projects. There are ways on how to build these improvements for simpler than a faster design and mobile web sites.

Developed the method when you are ready to access mobile phones World Wide Web Consortium or W3C web site is to facilitate the rapid development of a WAP site to the developers to evaluate. Has released a tool called the MobiReady report web site mobile-ready test is mobile ready site registry, mTLD also established practices and industry standards. The of these tools is available as a reference, as a way to build a web site design and high speed mobile.

One of the basic principles and limitations should know in a mobile web site design. To summarize, these limitations are.

You can use cascading style sheets to design a mobile web site o layout only. Traditional website which one cannot table to lay out the page design.

o XHTML (extensions HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML, you can hard code using the page design.

You can be reading and mobile phone browsers only using standard o UTF-8 encoded characters.

o that each specific page size for a particular phone. Page at 640 x 480 resolution and almost has an average of 120 pixels.

o must be placed at the top of the page freedom of placing what information you need to put them anywhere on a computer, access page in design Unlike WAP-site of the most important information.

recommended for o WAP user radio button and instead prefers the use of the list text input fields, such as information input, textarea and TextField.

o oriented WAP site accepts only JPEG and GIF image formats.

You can accept the maximum page size of 20 kb o mobile phones only. Crashes when accessing this page, mobile phone is more than big.

Pure HTML uses the mobile page. You cannot provide links to videos, as well as portable document format or pdf files. Allow mobile phones to play files from WAP site not yet configured for Flash or other similar file types, you can't embed.

o WAP sites to speed dial-up connection and access to most mobile devices. As a designer, you that are too large in the WAP user accesses and method that you have to need to design a long page too. Users, it is important to your pages to load quickly, so pay via their mobile phone Internet access time.

o mobile devices do not unlike luxury with icon navigation for your web browser. Mobile phone users to move pages on mobile phones, scrollers and buttons to be used is limited. Placing the interface designers in most mobile phone WAP interface click the back button is not, because even to go to the previous page is recommended.

Use the mobile site.mobi top-level domain name is hosted. And approved by the Internet Corporation assigned names and numbers of domain is managed by the mTLD global registry of domain names. Like the above to verify that a friendly web sites that are hosted in the.mobi domain following certain standard mobile processors. To the W3C released this standard by design, mobile Web, and how to build them to achieve a positive moving experience to optimize user specifies.

Is main points on how to build mobile websites design, these summarize the previous information.

o to design user interfaces for your mobile site to a content editor the need. These editors are available from the Web site. Some of them are free, but in a commercial.

o web site design (it depends on developing your phone model), screen size be remembered that can handle the WAP enabled handsets for mobile phones, such as the maximum file size must be limited.

o content is also rich in the up on the Internet by using the emulator, you can test. These emulators are no longer uploaded to host beta version of your content, but using WAP-enabled cell phones then, mimicking the mobile access environment.

o mobile web site is uploaded, by using the ".mobi" top domain name hosting.

The mobile landscape – the truth behind the hype

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This year, 2010, is apparently the year of the mobile. Any organisation dealing in digital media is talking about it, Wall Street analysts are lionising the potential and there are a growing number of major brands implementing their mobile strategy. Any international marketer worth their salt is plotting a course to get access to the pockets of the 4 billion mobile subscribers world-wide. Many organisations are now starting to meet the associated technology challenges head-on and this paper points the way for innovative brands to begin implementing high impact mobile initiatives immediately.

However, executing a mobile strategy today is an evolving process, and there are significant hurdles to overcome in constructing effective, broad-based, mobile initiatives. It is not just about delivering a new piece of technology (which is getting easier) but it is also about the application of that technology to the market you are addressing and how to get your customers embracing your mobile channel. Obviously, the need to create a compelling user experience is key to the success of your campaign. We have learned through painful experience that in reality your customers will try your mobile channel only once before deciding whether or not to give it 'general air-play'.

Why is 'going mobile' so hard? In short, the mobile medium has many different players from carriers to handset manufacturers to platforms to content publishers and many others. There are few standards for moving content across carriers to different mobile devices and it is still a little daunting for the uninitiated to navigate. Despite the noise and the 'explosive' growth of this market there are only a handful of suppliers that understand how to produce and publish rich, compelling, relevant and engaging content across the multiplicity of mobile device types now available.

The first obstacle to overcome exists in the form factor of mobile devices. Consumer expectations of the interactive media experience have been shaped by the Internet, and the Internet experience does not map directly to the small screen size and is limited by the bandwidth of the mobile environment. Mobile initiatives must be conceived and designed specifically to support a compelling mobile experience. Our experience to-date has been that this is uncharted territory for the vast majority of mobile brand strategies and has been characterised more by trials than by national and international rollouts.

The next challenge is that, unlike the open, standards-driven Internet, the mobile world is highly fragmented. There are currently more than 30 major handset manufacturers producing over 500 different phones, with significant variations in operating systems, screen sizes, display resolution, processing speed, memory, and performance. These differences mean that mobile content and applications must be adapted to run on multiple, dissimilar devices, greatly complicating the development effort. Further variations in service delivery among more than 600 carriers add still more development complications and cost. For these reasons, many mobile campaigns today are limited either to one carrier and a handful of devices, which compromises reach, or to the most basic of content technologies, which compromises effectiveness.

Perhaps the most important question that needs answering is: "Do you believe the hype and if so, is the timing right for me to 'go mobile' now?" If the answer to both is 'yes' the next question is "How will I gain competitive advantages comparable to those of pioneering web initiatives a decade ago?"

Given that the mobile market is in a constant state of flux and the noise level is constantly increasing - what are the possibilities open to an innovative brand?

There are five distinct tried and trusted methods for extending mobile initiatives to new audiences, which are described as follows in the chronological order of their entrance to the general market.

1. Text messaging via SMS has universal reach, and offers simplicity. It's also the most common non-voice use of mobile devices, accessed by anyone who texts friends and family or downloads ringtones and provides a solid delivery mechanism.

2. Rich content delivery via MMS (multimedia messaging service) delivers basic video, audio, and pictures in addition to text, and can be used for more colourful, animated enticements such as directions to a restaurant or a coupon for a film. SMS and MMS can team up, with SMS making the initial solicitation and MMS providing the delivery of rich content. On the downside, SMS/MMS offer very limited content delivery - only 160 characters. SMS, being text-only, can deliver just bare messages. While MMS adds basic multimedia, it and SMS share a further limitation in that they offer only two-way, walkie-talkie type communications. They are useful for alerting users to special offers and in following up offer acceptance by sending simple, static content. They do not provide an effective means to a brand experience and must also be used with caution; nobody likes receiving unwanted text messages on a mobile phone, or worse, getting stuck with usage charges.

3. The Mobile Web uses WAP (wireless application protocol) to access web sites. The WAP browser, which operates much like a computer-based browser but is simplified for the mobile environment, can deliver a much more satisfying user experience than SMS/MMS can, and is fully interactive. Mobile phones with browser capabilities are mainstream, and while usage is less common than SMS/MMS, approximately 75% of all mobile devices are Internet-enabled. What those users do with their WAP browsers differs markedly from their behaviour with computer browsers, as general web surfing on a mobile device just doesn't work well. There's no mouse, no proper keyboard, the connections are slower and web sites designed for computer access typically display awkwardly on small mobile screens. That makes the mobile web best suited to utilities that target specific audiences with tailored offerings. For example, an airline mobile service that displays flight status, schedule information, itineraries, and offers flight changes and check-in. In other words, delivering a limited portion of the content and functionality available at a brand's full web site, formatted specifically for handsets. Having identified an appropriate application, the challenge of accommodating variations among devices and carriers remains.

4. Downloadable rich media applications that support a variety of environments including Java, BREW, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and iPhone, are now hitting the headlines. These applications enable a far richer user experience than do SMS/MMS or mobile web, with the addition of high-quality video and audio and a higher level of contextual presentation, such as menu choices that make optimum use of screen real estate at any given point in the user experience. Creating compelling mobile applications requires significantly more that simply deciding what content to include and where to reformat the full web site and necessitates the creation of fresh content and interaction designed and optimized specifically for the mobile experience. Even though most phones are rich-media capable, few rich media device independent applications exist. For example, Apple now boasts that there are more than 100,000 iPhone Applications or Apps ( http://bit.ly/803DzU ) for this specific device - but it's highly unlikely that the vast majority of these will ever be ported to other handsets. That's largely a development issue and means that the proliferation of these applications cannot be ubiquitous unless they are developed for every single type of smart phone. Unlike in the computer world, a Java version that works on one mobile device doesn't necessarily work on other mobile devices. Given the proliferation of device-specific Java implementations, brands who choose to deliver rich media applications are often forced to choose which devices they'll support, in order to control development and testing costs.

5. Flash Lite is a runtime environment specifically optimized for mobile phones. Flash Lite enables OEMs and operators to differentiate their devices via customized user interfaces, a more complete web experience, and the ability to access video and mobile content across devices.

Now we have covered what is available we should consider how a brand should start to implement these technologies. Most brands that have embarked on their mobile strategy have often commenced their initiative with a marketing focus and have largely limited this activity to SMS/MMS campaigns, using them with the most basic user interaction. Those who have ventured further typically partner with a vendor offering either mobile web or rich media expertise. Because of the inherent technology bias, this risks letting technology drive the implementation, rather than business goals driving the implementation. Ideally, a brand wanting to optimize their efforts would be best served by partnering with a vendor that can support their strategic initiative with whichever technology is best suited to the task, combining multiple technologies to support different aspects of the mobile initiative when appropriate. It would be a bold move to commence an initiative using 'in-house' resources that have no track record of success and at this stage of the market development there are a small but growing number of suppliers who offer robust and reliable development platforms - not dissimilar to the early days of the internet. The prudent choice should be a vendor who has been in the market for some time with a demonstrable track record of delivering exponential growth from the mobile channel.

If you are seriously interested in divining and executing your mobile strategy you will be glad you made the decision because the sooner you get started with high-impact mobile campaigns, the sooner you'll have a serious competitive advantage in reaching those 4 billion global mobile phone subscribers.

In conclusion, there is now hard data ( http://bit.ly/4JJDq4 ) showing that the mobile internet is ramping up faster than desktop internet did. There currently exists an explosion in the growth of mobile data which is set to continue for some time. Mobile is here to stay and is only going to dwarf the first internet wave due to its ubiquity, necessity, convenience, and proximity to nearly everything we do.

What goes behind the design of a mobile site

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It cannot be denied that almost everything nowadays is mobile. Whereas before laptops were not common, today these gadgets are abundant and actually cost lower than they used to cost before. Cellular phones were not the trend in the past, but nowadays almost everyone has a cellphone.

Recognizing these, cellular companies and website programmers have launched what is now called the Wireless Application Protocol. Abbreviated as WAP, it is the international standard for Internet access using a mobile phone or from a personal digital assistant. The mobile application for WAP is very similar to a web browser in computers (Mozilla Firefox, Opera, atc.) but with some features removed to comply with mobile phone standards.

With WAP, mobile users can access services provided by various websites from their cellphones. They can send email, browse through the latest news reports in major news websites, track news about their favorite sport events and even download music files to their phones. This is very useful for businessmen, who are always on the go and might sometimes find carrying a laptop around as tiresome.

Despite its similarity to the Hypertext Markup Language used to design websites, WAP sites are created using the Wireless Markup Language. Similar to HTML, WML provides web interface features such as navigation, data input forms, hyperlinks, text and images.

How Mobile Internet Works

Mobile Internet access works much like its computer-based cousins. It uses a bridge or gateway to access the World Wide Web. When the user requests a page, the bridge retrieves the pages from the Web. These pages are then converted into a format that the phone can read and recognize.

One wonderful feature of mobile Internet is that you can query for phone numbers of certain establishments through the Web. You can then use the numbers that are returned by the query to make a call through your cellular phone, saving you from the hassle of having to dial the number to make a call.

The Process of Designing and Building a Mobile Website

There is little difference on how to design and build a mobile website as compared to designing conventional websites which are accessed from a desktop or laptop browser. But it is important to know these differences before one decides to tackle the task of creating websites specific for WAP browsers.

For one, designing a mobile website takes a far longer time to complete as compared to its desktop cousins. This is because the WAP accessing terminals in each phone model varies from each other. There is a different terminal for Nokia devices, and different ones for Sony Ericsson, so on and so forth. WML itself has very strict specifications because it is a very different beast compared to its ancestor, HTML, despite their similarities in the appearance and behavior of sites that are built using their codes. Thus, one finds that there are different methods of how to design and build a mobile website that caters to each of these specific phone models.

To design a mobile website, you need specific authoring kits for mobile phones. In the beginning, when mobile phones did not support the XHTML standard, content providers needed specific development kits to come up with WAP-specific pages. This is in great contrast to designing desktop-accessed pages, where one only needs a text editor and a browser to design and test a page.

Fortunately, WAP authoring kits are available and are abundant in the Internet. To search for these kits, one only needs to type "mobile website authoring kits" in their preferred search engine and will be rewarded by a lot of hits, or search results. These results are links to the various WAP development kits that can downloaded from the World Wide Web.

There also documentation available in the Internet providing information on how to design and build a mobile website. For example, mTLD hosts a myriad of training resources including ebooks on how to make your websites compliant while mobile phone internet standards.

Initially, unlike conventional websites, WAP sites need to be tested using a cellular phone itself. This has made designing and building mobile websites take a far longer time to be completed as compared to computer-based web sites. Nowadays, however, more and more mobile phones are adapting to the XHTML and XML standards. Plus, there are also mobile phone emulators (software that imitate the environment of a mobile phone) that can be downloaded from the Internet. The mobile web designers can use these emulators to speed up the testing phase of their projects. Because of these improvements, the ways of how to design and build mobile web sites are much easier and faster.

To facilitate faster development of WAP sites, the World Wide Web consortium or the W3C has developed a scheme in which developers can assess if their web sites are ready to be accessed by mobile phones. The registry of mobile ready sites, mTLD has even released a tool, named "MobiReady Report" to test for the mobile readiness of website using established practices and standards of the industry. These tools can be used as a reference as to how to design and build mobile web sites faster.

There are basic principles and limitations one should be aware of in designing a mobile website. Summarized, these limitations are:

o Only Cascading Style Sheets can be used to design the layout of your mobile website. In contrast to conventional websites, one cannot use tables to lay out the design of the pages.

o XHTML (Extended HTML) and XML (Extensible Markup Language) can be used to hard-code the pages' design.

o Only characters encoded using the UTF-8 standard can be readable and accepted by mobile phones' browsers.

o There are specific page sizes for each specific phone. The pages have a resolution of 640x480 at most, and 120 pixels on the average.

o Unlike designing pages that are accessed by a computer, in which you have the freedom of placing whatever information wherever you may want to put them, you have to place the most important information of your WAP site at the top of the page.

o WAP users favor the use of radio buttons and list to take their picks, rather than entering information through text entry fields such as text areas and textfields.

o Only the JPEG and GIF image formats are accepted in a WAP-oriented site.

o Mobile phones can only accept a maximum page size of 20 kilobytes. Any larger than that and it will cause phones to crash when accessing the pages.

o Pure HTML is used a mobile page. You cannot provide links to videos, as well as the Portable Document Format or PDF. You cannot embed Flash and other similar file types as well because mobile phones are not yet configured to be able to play such files from WAP sites.

o Most mobile devices access WAP sites with the speed of a dial-up connection. As a designer, you must be careful to design your pages in a way that it will be too big and take too long for the WAP user to access. Users pay for the time that they access the Internet through their phones, so it is important for your pages to load quickly.

o Mobile devices do not have the luxury of navigational icons unlike web browsers. Mobile phone users are limited to using the directional buttons and scrollers on their phones to navigate through a page. Designers are also encouraged to put in an interface to navigate to the previous page because most mobile phones do not have a "back" button in their WAP interfaces.

Mobile websites are hosted using the top-domain name of .mobi. The domain is approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and is managed by the mTLD global registry for domain names. Like mentioned earlier, websites hosted on the .mobi domain follows a specific standard in order to make sure that they are friendly to mobile phone processors. This standard, released by the W3C, specifies how to design and build mobile websites and optimizing them for users to achieve positive experience in navigating them.

To summarize previous information, these are the key points of how to design and build mobile websites:

o You need a content editor in order to design the user interface of your mobile website. These editors are available from the World Wide Web. Some of them are free, some are commercial.

o There are limitations that should be remembered when designing websites for the mobile phones, including the screen size (which is dependent on the phone model you are developing for) and the maximum file size that a WAP-ready mobile phone can handle.

o The content you come up with can be tested using an emulator that is also available in abundance in the Internet. These emulators imitate the environment of a cellular phone so you no longer have to upload your beta content to a host, and then access them using a WAP-ready mobile.

o Mobile web sites are uploaded and hosted using the ".mobi" top-domain name.