Our solution was a site that clearly centres around Gareth Hoyle the man, but not to the extent of the ‘cult-ish’ personal branding sites used by famous entrepreneurs such as Peter Jones or Duncan Bannatyne. Since it could have a wide range of potential users, it therefore needed to allow people to easily find the content that was of most relevance to them. As Gareth was keen to ensure that mobile users enjoyed the same quality browsing experience as desktop users, the website was designed on a responsive framework so that desktop, tablet and mobile users all receive a unique design catering for their own particular needs.

Not only that but we delivered a new brand identity and guidelines for usage as part of the job. Can’t be bad!

Check it out now on your device of choice at www.garethhoyle.com

One of the age-old problems, ever since web design was first invented circa 1000 years ago, was, well, just how big do I make my website? Should I cater for the lowest possible screen size, or the most common, or what? Clients always used to ask me, much to my professional chagrin, “Can you make it fill my screen?” to which the inevitable reply was, “Well, precisely how big is your screen?” The only way to really achieve this was to make the whole design fluid (i.e. 100% of the browser’s width, whatever that happened to be) and allow the design to “flow” across the screen. Sadly the problem was that pixel-perfect sizing and positioning of images was pretty much a no-go area since, although columns and so forth in HTML can be resized, resizing of images dynamically on the fly wasn’t, then, much of an option.

Anyway, it was a right royal pain, and since the arrival of mobile devices and tablets, it’s just got a lot worse. Who knows what a user is going to be looking at your site on? It could be a fancy Apple Cinema Display, a tablet in portrait mode or a smartphone with the smallest screen real estate known to man. To counter this, and thanks to the appearance of improved CSS and media query support in most modern browsers, there has been a trend recently in the web design world towards what has been conveniently monickered ‘responsive’ web design.

Essentially this means that the webpage is built as normal and a few lines at the top of the code decide, depending on the screen size of the device viewing it, which CSS stylesheet to serve the user. So anyone looking at a site on a normal desktop machine or tablet in landscape mode (with a screen over, say, 1000 pixels wide) can receive one version of the layout, a user on a tablet with a width of 768 pixels (such as an iPad in portrait mode) another version and a user on a smartphone with a screen width of 320 pixel another. In fact you could make as many different ‘cuts’ of this scenario as you like, targeting various devices and width, simply depending on how much time you have to design and code the individual stylesheets. To get an idea of how this all works in practice, check out the excellent mediaqueri.es website, a great resource for responsive sites built using CSS and media queries. Responsive web design also makes content available on a single URL, which some search engine marketers cite as a solution to the problem of duplicate content.

All sounds great, then. The client gets a new website covering all bases at a relatively low cost, the website administrator gets the one set of pages to worry about updating, the developers get one set of HTML code to manage and everyone can take the afternoon off, safe in the knowledge that all users are going to receive something suited to their needs. Well, almost.

The first issue with responsive design is that, although the page can be styled differently for each device, that device still has to download all the HTML, Javascript and associated imagery for the page, even if it’s not going to be displayed. Surely it’s irresponsible to ask visitors to download all that extraneous HTML, marking up content they’ll never even see let alone benefit from, especially if those users are on a slow mobile connection? The page will be sluggish to load and their bandwidth quote will be eaten up very rapidly. They’ll probably give up and go elsewhere.

Likewise is it not inconceivable that your mobile users will want content differing from that of a normal desktop user? Maybe they don’t want to spend ages reading your mission statement and sales waffle, but just want to search for a product, or find a service that’s close to where they are. The second issue with responsive design is that underneath the device-unique styling, the page is using the same HTML code and content, regardless of platform. So although CSS can show, hide and to a certain extent reformat a page, the one thing it cannot do is change or move significantly your page content, unless of course you want to code scenarios for both desktop and mobile devices into the one page and then show/hide whichever one is appropriate. For anyone thinking of doing that, I’ll refer you to the first point above with the words ‘code’ and ‘bloat’!

The point is, it’s not just a case of making your site render successfully on a smartphone. Your users couldn’t care less about how responsive your site is, as they’re looking at it right now on their own device of choice. No-one else’s. What they do care about, however, is if your site takes ages to load and doesn’t let them do immediately what, as a mobile user, they want to. It’s not about ticking boxes, it’s about delivering the best possible, most appropriate solution to the user. And that’s where responsive design falls over as it simply can’t create a completely bespoke experience for each situation. Simple brochureware websites, no problem, but there’s no way a complex eCommerce site can be mobilized using a media query and CSS. That’s why big retailers such as Sainsbury’s and M&S stick to the bespoke mobile site route. They’re not daft…

In conclusion, just because you can put all of your content on one URL doesn’t mean you should. There’s a time and place for responsive website design, but it’s not every time and every place. Sure, there are times when it will make sense, but when it doesn’t make sense, a bespoke mobile website with a mobile URL is the best solution.

You can check out the full clip on the BBC website here or download the app itself from either the iTunes App Store or Google Marketplace.

In association with the organisers North & Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, Mobiomic have teamed up to develop their first mobile app to celebrate this year’s event. Now the business community of Lancashire can keep up-to-date with all the latest BIBAs news and views, book their tickets for the 2012 event as well as look back at last year’s event through a series of unique video interviews and image galleries.

Chief Executive of North and Western Lancashire Chamber of Commerce, Babs Murphy, said: “We were immediately taken by the idea of producing an app for this year’s BIBAs. It will really push the perception of the event forward in people’s minds and keep them involved and connected in real-time with the event.  We’re passionate about introducing new concepts to ensure that the BIBAs remain the one they all want to win”.

Creative Director of Mobiomic, Andy Whitwood, said of the app, “It’s great to be involved with the BIBAs this year, they really do showcase the best in business that Lancashire has to offer. It’s certainly an innovative way to promote the event and really demonstrate the power of apps for today’s modern businesses.”

Find out more at www.thebibas.co.uk or download the BIBAS 2012 from the iTunes App Store now.

OK, then. Mobile means apps, so what you need my friend is an iPhone app, right? Wrong. iPhone users represent a mere fraction (albeit a pretty cool fraction) of the overall mobile marketplace. The Android operating system is now used by far more users than the Apple iOS and across a much wider variety of handsets. And don’t forget loyal Blackberry users, be then businesses who’ve invested heavily in the platform for their workforce or teenagers addicted to their instant messenger service. And then there’s Palm, and Windows 7. Oh, and tablets. So surely then, all you have to do is produce your app and make it available for every single platform?

Well, you could. As with so many other things these days, each phone uses it’s own operating system and native language, so an app has to be written specifically for each OS (unless you create an HTML5 application and wrap it up natively, but that’s another story for another day). You could invest tens of thousands of pounds creating versions for every single operating system out there and get them launched into their respective stores. You could then have the mammoth task, not only of promoting these apps so that they get noticed amidst the general noise of the internet, but of keeping them updated, making sure they work on the various incremental updates of each individual operating system and handset.

Sounds like a headache to me. And it is, unless you have the budget of a major player, in which case your users will pretty much flock to download your apps anyway. But for the rest of us, it’s not quite that simple to find the silver bullet. For every iFart and Angry Birds a lot have fallen by the wayside…

Fortunately, however, there is an easier option. About 70 per cent of the world’s population has a mobile phone and according to Microsoft’s 2011 report about mobile statistics, out of 4 billion mobile users around the world, there are 1.08 billion smartphone users meaning 27 percent of mobile users access the internet through their mobile phones. Mobile internet users are even estimated to reach 788 million by 2015.

These smartphones, whilst not being as super-fast as your desktop PC, are able to view most modern websites, with the notorious example of anything in Flash on an Apple device, but let’s not go there right now. In fact iOS Safari on iPhone and iPads renders pretty much identically to its desktop counterpart. Couple that to the fact that it’s relatively easy to promote your URL, in fact you’ve probably been doing it for years anyway, and that you can more than likely be found quite simply anyway through search engines, and I think you can see where I’m going with this.

The answer, if you want to create something that can be viewed cross-platform, can be updated across all devices instantly, can tap into marketing activity already being used and has maximum ROI, is a mobile-friendly website. Modern HTML techniques can even replicate a lot of native app look-and-feel, plus access most of the device’s features such as GPS and camera, so we’re not talking about the slew of simple WML sites that arrived a few years back.

Apps can then follow, certainly, but the basis of any brand’s mobile offering must surely begin with their mobile website as the chances are that existing customers are already interacting with your website on their mobile, but they’ll almost certainly be struggling to do so! The likelihood are they will try to open your website but they will leave immediately if their device cannot access your site’s pages or they find navigating around cumbersome. One of the most important things that determines a website’s effectiveness and popularity is it’s bounce rate. The higher the bounce rate, the less the site’s perceived effectiveness and that impacts on the site as a whole in the eyes of the search engines. Not being mobile-friendly can actually harm your website!

Here’s a good case in point. A client of mine recently identified that 25% of the traffic to their website was coming from mobile devices. A mobile site was therefore a no-brainer, why spend time and money creating apps for these visitors when existing traffic should be harnessed and delivered a far better user experience? That’s got to be an easy win in anyone’s book. Sure, they’ll probably create an iPhone app in the near future, to give those users who want it a more immersive experience that draws on the specific functionality of their device, but for now they’ve got all their mobile customers covered with a slick, user-friendly mobile experience.

The mobile web will be one of the most important aspects of digital communications in the near future. The more you understand its importance, the better. And the faster you can build a mobile friendly website, the greater the possibility of maintaining your website’s credibility, popularity and effectiveness.

Make your website mobile

Go to http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php right now and view your website as it looks on a few different mobile handsets. Does it show up at all? Does it look like a tiny version of your full website? If it’s visible, that’s better than nothing. However, if it looks like a tiny version of your full site (most do), then you could be doing a lot better. Even on devices like the iPhone that can display a full web page properly, you should be catering specifically to these devices with a version of your site that fits the phone better.

There are services that will make your site mobile, but it often involves either paying money or hosting the mobile version on their servers. We seriously recommend doing it yourself and owning the site.

Mobile SEO

Optimizing your site for mobile search engines is a whole field itself. However, you can cover the following basics quickly:

• Make sure mobile devices can display your site. Check the emulator above for different devices, or better yet borrow your friends’ phones and check it there. Having a site that doesn’t show up is the fastest way to get kicked out of the search results.
• Create a mobile sitemap and submit it in your Google Webmaster Tools account (Google provides instructions).
• Get some links from other mobile websites to your mobile site. This helps get your mobile site listed as such in the search results. Mobile directories like dir.mobi are a good place to start.

Use the Hcard microformat

This sounds a lot harder than it is. It’s just your business information in a format that search engines and other sites that crawl around the web looking for local business data can easily consume. Helping other sites locate and list your business properly allows customers to find you when they search for you on their phones. Use the tool at hcardcreator.com to produce the code and slap it on your site where you keep your contact info.

Claim your venue on Foursquare

If you haven’t heard of Foursquare, you should check it out. It’s a game where people check-in at real world locations using Foursquare’s app and compete to see who checks in the most. You can immediately see the value in people frequently checking in from your business, Better yet, Foursquare has a set of free tools for merchants to use: https://foursquare.com/business/venues

Use them to track the activity at your venue and offer special discounts to Foursquare’s 10 million users.

Use your Facebook fan page

I’m going to assume that you have a Facebook fan page for your business. If you don’t, get one right now. Like, before you finish this article. But assuming you do, you should know that Facebook is the second most visited mobile site after Google. So your customers are using it while on the go.

The first tip is just to communicate with them, keep your page fresh and keep your fans informed of what’s going on with your business. If you have a discount to offer them, do it through the new Facebook deals feature. Facebook will help you promote your deal in your area. It’s a lot like Groupon but without all the fees that cause you to lose money on the deal.

Apps World Europe is one of the leading multi-platform events in the industry, and this year’s Earl’s Court 2 event is set to be the biggest yet. We’re expecting over 5000+ developers, digital marketers, telecoms providers, device manufacturers, platform owners and apps industry professionals for two days of high-level insight and discussion around the latest technological and strategic developments; examining the opportunities and threats they pose across the industry. We’ll be holding court at stand 149 and demoing some of our latest creations whilst also being available for discussion on how we can help mobilise your brand’s digital offering, be it via apps or mobile-friendly websites.

So why not pop along for a coffee and say hello? For further information, simply visit the Apps World website at: www.apps-world.net/europe/

The iPhone app allows delegates to browse seminars and sponsor details, check out the floorplan of the event, view galleries and videos from last year’s event, plus stay in touch with all the latest happenings through live news and Twitter feeds. They can even register online before the event.

The Convergence Summit 2012 app is available to download now from the iTunes store.

As of 14th February you can now reach us at:

Mobiomic Limited
6th Floor, 120 Bark Street, Bolton, BL1 2AX
Telephone: 0844 8709219

View in Google Maps

Managed by Regus, 120 Bark Street is a new development located within the heart of Bolton’s town centre. We’re ideally situated near Bolton’s primary retail and business core with excellent communications by both road and rail. Bolton station is a few minutes walk away, plus we’ve ample car parking all around us. Or you could always do as our own Andy does, and travel in by bicycle!

So feel free to come along and say hello. We’ve always got a brew on…

Jens is a master brewer with dedicated international expertise in innovation. He joined the brewing industry in 1991, after completing his M.Sc. in pharmacy. He has worked in many supply chain roles for Royal Unibrew, Carlsberg, The Jacobsen Brewhouse and Molson Coors Brewing Company, and has recently joined the brewing enzymes department at Novozymes Switzerland AG.

Jens says of the app “This application answers many of the hoppy thoughts I have had as a master brewer, and many of the hoppy questions I have received over the last 20 years. I have divided this application into 7 keys. These keys cover topics for you as a brewer, to consider when dosing hops in whatever form you have decided to use.”

Available to download now from the iTunes store, or find out more information at www.BrewersHops.com