Mobile Web Design

The book I read to research this post was Mobile Web Design by Janine Warner which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book was written in 2010 when I think it was more of an issue writing a website which was compatible with mobile phones. It’s probably not a surprise they haven’t updated the book but as a book on its topic it’s a great book. Strangely enough there doesn’t seem to be many books available on that topic. I’d suggest if you are looking at doing a mobile friendly site try weebly.com which is at least compatible with android & iphone and has a free option which I use although I did buy a domain name & if you are looking for more advanced features they do a paid option. One interesting fact in the book is there were 87 varieties of blackberry, all slightly different making keeping your site compatible with all a nightmare. Obviously nowadays most smartphones are compatible with things like CSS which helps make the job easier. The 1st iphone was compatible with CSS 2. You do still get problems with getting a site compatible with mobile devices & I get plenty of comments about that subject on my blogs. I think some site like blogger give you the option of making your blog mobile friendly but technology is catching up rapidly & it’s worth bearing in mind only around 20% of your traffic is mobile. I think if you are interested in this subject this book along with Mobile Marketing For Dummies which I recently covered is a good starting point. Incidently I have 2 sites on weebly at

http://scratbag.net & http://oldescratbag.com I would welcome it if anyone wants to have a look at them.

Mobile Marketing

The book I read to research this post was Mobile Marketing For Dummies by Michael Becker et al which is a very good book which I read at

http://safaribooksonline.com

This book is a few years old so some of the technology in it might have been superceded like at the time of publication Windows Phone 7 hadn’t been released yet. Apparently in developing countries almost everyone who can afford it has a mobile phone because the infrastructure of a standard phone network just isn’t there. This book is about marketing your company for people with mobile phones and a lot of it’s geared towards the smartphone market. A lot of companies get a mobile marketing agency like http://www.constantcontact.com. An interesting technology is IVR or Interactive Voice Response where a customer phones you and is presented with a menu where they press a button or speak into the phone to activate an option an example is http://www.angel.com of a provider. Some banks like Western Union are allowing people to buy stuff direct from their mobile phone an interesting example is Amazon where you simply enter your password and your credit card details are entered automatically once set up initially. If you get a mobile website I have one at http://oldescratbag.com a good provider which I use is weebly or try

http://starcut.com .Some companies use a bluecast provider at shows or exhibitions etc where a message or photo etc is sent to people walking by your stand by bluetooth and they have the option of accepting it or not. An example is

http://www.aura.net . Also a website I recommend which is all the latest mobile technology news is http://engadgetmobile.com . I enjoyed this book and it has a lot of information about mobile marketing crammed into it.