If you know about the .mobi domain, you know that it’s designed to help you find made-for-mobile content easily on your mobile phone. But now that there’s a iPhone and a Google phone, among many others, that promise you “the full Internet,” who needs mobile content and a .mobi domain to find it?
You do.
Smartphones have been a giant leap forward for the mobile Web and for the .mobi domain, but the mobile Web has not been – and never will be – the desktop Web rendered on a mobile phone screen. The physical difference in size and the different navigation control schemes of mobile phones and desktop-based PCs demand separate treatment. Smartphones do nothing to change this.
The art of creating great mobile sites is understanding that context – not just content – is king. Understanding how and when somebody will want to access your site via mobile becomes crucial to knowing what content to offer.
As an example, the typical corporate site of a courier company may contain sections with company history, press releases, investor relations and any number of other things that are of no use to a mobile customer who likely wants an address to drop a package or to track a delivery. This being the case, why make that mobile customer wade through the entire contents of a desktop site to find what they are looking for? The “pinch / zoom” functionality of the iPhone is sometimes presented as the solution to this navigation problem but, again, the context in which the product is being used isn’t considered. In the vast majority of situations, mobile phones are used with one hand. In these circumstances, the pinch / zoom functionality is useless. Anybody who commutes regularly via public transport is all too aware of such situations and the limitations of the pinch / zoom.
Fast forward to the near future when the majority of people are using their mobile phones to access the Web as regularly as they use their desktop PCs today. Do you think that successful companies will continue to serve desktop sites to their mobile audience? Of course not. People will simply not have the patience to work through unwieldy sites to find the information they want; they will simply move on to companies who understand their needs.
In light of this, the iPhone – and every other smartphone – fails to change very much for mobile Web access. The crucial element is understanding needs of mobile users and serving them appropriate content. As long as this need exists, which it always will, there will be a need to easily find mobile content. This is the role of the .mobi domain as the only industry-backed, ICANN-approved designation for mobile Web content.
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