Publishers are trying to strike a delicate balance in these early days of the mobile Web: How do you offer enough eye candy to a make a site compelling without overloading the limited processing power of most mobile phones?
Online site operators face a host of challenges in taking their offerings mobile, from settling on a top-level domain (.mobi or .com?) to deciding whether to transcode PC-targeted content for handsets or redirect users to mobile-only sites. And after all that heavy lifting is done, they must adapt their advertising businesses for wireless, either forging new relationships directly with advertisers or outsourcing inventory sales to one of the many mobile marketing players on the field.
Perhaps the most important factor though, is determining what content-and how much of it-should be accessible from a phone. Technical platforms such as Flash and HTML frames are simply unworkable on most handsets and must be stripped. But even the simplest images can drag down a site’s performance, turning a quick stroll on the wireless Web into a painful slog.
Simplicity key
Those issues were highlighted last week in a report from market research group Keynote Competitive Research, which for years has measured the performance of Internet sites. Keynote issued its first rankings of mobile Web sites and, unsurprisingly, found that the simplest sites provide the quickest user experience. (Keynote’s testing used Motorola Inc.’s Razr V3 from four locations in the United States and five in Europe.)
“We’re trying to do a cross-section of different types of sites that are popular in mobile,” said Manny Gonzalez, senior director of mobile technologies for the 12-year-old company. “It helps them understand what is the user experience in terms of performance, speed, availability and download.”
Google, whose mobile homepage is astonishingly simple, topped nine other popular sites with an average download time of 6.54 seconds. Facebook’s mobile site-which generally consists of the company’s logo and about a dozen text links-took an average of 6.84 seconds to download, just behind Google’s performance.
Richer sites, of course, require more patience. The mobile home pages of MSN and ESPN, for instance, each took more than 14 seconds to download, and AOL proved the slowest of the sites, requiring a full 16 seconds to download. But visitors to AOL’s offering are rewarded with a menu of icons from which to choose as well as stock information, a photo or two and news stories. And AOL’s site includes a whopping 32.5 kilobytes of data, according to Keynote, more than 7 times Facebook’s site.
Interestingly, AOL topped the nine other sites when it came to delivering its payload efficiently. AOL’s site delivered more than 2 kilobytes per second, while Facebook finished last with 678 bytes per second-underscoring the ability of wireless networks to take a data-heavy package and move it as quickly as possible.
“A pure, raw download of content will be faster if you’re downloading more content,” Gonzalez explained, “because the network does some optimizing of that content.”
And as the more established players tweak their offerings, newcomers would be wise to move conservatively into mobile. While text-heavy wireless Web sites may not be sexy, they are at least usable on a handset-which is more than many traditional Internet sites can claim.
“There’s a golden rule for mobile Web design, and I think it’s that less is more,” according to Rachel Pasqua, director of mobile marketing at iCrossing Inc., an Arizona-based outfit with offices in the United States and the United Kingdom. “Keep your file size small, ideally under 20k. … You have to have copy and keep it simple.”
