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Mobile applications redefined the user experience but represent only a pit stop in the continuing evolution.
By Dan O'Shea Β | Β Entrepreneur Magazine - March 2011
To land the big fishes, you need to be able to find them. But like the fishes themselves, data about where and when the big ones are biting don't stay fresh for long.
The 100,000 or so user forum members of Bigfishtackle.com like to share just that kind of information, but by the time they get back home or to their Wi-Fi enabled cabins to log on to tell their friends the best places to drop a line (or maybe just to gloat), it could be old news. It would be a lot better if they could log onto their mobile phones the instant they set the hook, right from the boat.
"Fishing reports can get a little dated," says Mike Hodgdon, COO of Colorado Springs, Colo.-based First Light Net, which runs Bigfishtackle.com and other websites for outdoor enthusiasts. "There is a big advantage for the angler to do this while they're actually on a fishing spot. That's why we started to see some demand to post to the forum from mobile phones."
The website became an early adopter of new technology enabling a mobile-optimized web browsing experience. In 2007, it started reformatting its site for smaller mobile device screens. But the business soon found dotMobi, a Dublin, Ireland, firm that's among a handful of companies that sells .mobi domain names, as well as tools for creating a mobile-optimized web experience. Now, Bigfishtackle.mobi gives forum members viewing, browsing and posting functions that are just like the desktop web experience, but rendered just right for a 3- or 4-inch mobile phone screen.
The site and others like it represent a growing trend among entrepreneurial businesses to achieve a more mobile-friendly web presence.
The .mobi designation isn't for a separate website--it's just a mobile-optimized extension. Bigfishtackle.com didn't have to change its URL. "You can post to the .mobi site, and it integrates with the regular website in real time," Hodgdon says.
Pinky Brand, director of global sales at dotMobi, estimates that businesses could realize a bump in traffic of 10 percent to 15 percent by mobile-optimizing their websites. That could be the amount of traffic they are losing if customers try to visit their regular websites from mobile phones and find them unfit for viewing on their device screens.
"Mobile is what a lot of consumers use to look for businesses right now," Brand says. "In truth, every business already has a mobile website because your website can be seen on mobile phones. It's just that the businesses may not know how bad it looks on a mobile phone."
Bigfishtackle.mobi was among the first sites launched with dotMobi's help. Though the site does see some unique visitors, Hodgdon says the crossover from the regular website has been especially notable, with about 40 percent of website visitors crossing over to the mobile-optimized version. That's a lot of impact for a project that cost its website proprietor little more than $8,000.
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