GoMobi Showcase?

[blacknight]

Have you used GoMobi to build a really cool site?
Why not share it with other users

(NB: Site must be using Gomobi)

[Adrian Shanahan]

Only last week we at www.trackandtrail.ie have sign up to GoMobi, have to say we are very happy. Set up took minutes and the results and features are excellent.

If you are viewing the this forum on a desktop and want a sneek peek at the site without a mobile device check it out here.


If you have a business website you NEED to make things easy on yourself and set up GoMobi.

[Daniel]

I don't meant to be negative but I'm a bit disappointed after check the site listed above.

A small note before start: To be mobile friendly you don't need to redesign a website, you just need to show the same information to your users taking into account that their screen size is small, (so you may need to resize big images and your content)

1- dynamic url's or query strings - dinamic url's like ?imz_st found on that example are wrong since not all mobile devices will understand how to interpret these url's after sometime you can check your error logs an you will find users that hit pages called "null" (www,example.com/null) in a 100% of the cases that I have seen there is a mobile device involved. Not all mobile devices handle these url's in the same way.

2- Input device - Not everybody that uses a mobile device carry on it's pocket a plastic pen or use something similar to "click" on the screen, and that it's because they are called "touch screens" so people use their fingers, If you take that site as an example you can take a look at the unnecessary list of links listed one before the other and you can imagine how annoying thy can be for people with big fingers, but the truth is that they are so close that they are hard for me with normal fingers on a Samsung Galaxy and on an iPhone 3.

3- Duplicated content - Because your user access your site from a mobile device you don't need a different website or a new one, also you don't need a new domain name or a sub-domain, all that you need is to serve the same page and the same url in a different way (depending on what is the user using to access you website) so far I will recommend you to use" rel canonical" pointing to your main website before Google start to pick up the duplicated content.


4- There are quite a lot of issues with that site and it's mobile version that need an urgent review in my opinion before been considered "mobile friendly" also there is a few other issues like browsability across different mobile browsers, rendering and portability of the site across all screen sizes, and loading time, a bit slow to my taste. If it was free I will say mmm... its ok, I can start from here and fix it later, but for a paid service, mmm it just let me a bit disappointed.


As I say before I don't want to sound negative so I will let the rest of the problem seen on that website for another time.

Have a nice day, and sorry for my English
Daniel

[francescoc]

Hi Daniel

My name is Francesco and I work for dotMobi, the company behind goMobi.

I think you raise some good points, but I would also like to put things a bit into perspective.

I am sure I state the obvious when I say that we are close to the point where almost any business must have a mobile presence. More and more people every day look for information and services around them on their mobile phones, so giving them a bad user experience is a guaranteed way of losing business.

From a designer's perspective you can discuss at length all the possible options available and all the cool stuff you can do with stuff like responsive design, jQuery mobile and HTML5. Clearly, the more advanced things get, the more complex the site ends up being and the costlier it becomes to build and maintain: for most business owners it ends up being just not a feasible cost to sustain.

From a business owner's perspective, a mobile site is just a tool to present key information about his/her business in the best possible way to mobile visitors, and help making it easier for these potential customers to choose them instead of a competitor. The objective of goMobi is to make this task of connecting businesses with customers as easy, quick and effective as possible: the feedback we have received so far tells us that we have been pretty successful at creating a service that works well on all kind of phones (thanks to our DeviceAtlas technology, that knows over 7500 different models of mobile phones and helps us ensure the same goMobi site adapts seamlessly to all kind of phones, from the cool touchscreen of an iPhone 4 to the tiny screen of a WAP-only phone like the ones still very popular in Africa and other emerging markets), provides a good user experience and quite simply gets the job done at a very affordable price point. Quite frankly, I think we are making it very hard for people to make excuses about not having a mobile presence.

More specifically to your points, I disagree that a mobile site should just be a copy of the desktop site adapted to a smaller screen. According to Google, people searching for services around them on a mobile phone are more likely to act on that search, and they surely don't want to waste time looking around for basic information like opening hours, phone numbers, directions: goMobi presents key information in a easily accessible format, with extra finesses like click-to-call phone numbers and turn-by-turn directions on GPS-enabled phones to make sure those mobile visitors can turn into paying customers as soon as possible.

As far as the URL format is concerned, based on our tests with DeviceAtlas there has never been a problem like the one you describe, but obviously if you have specific examples of devices that have given you that kind of issue I would really appreciate it, so that we can make sure to fix any problem like that.

Regarding using goMobi sites on a touchscreen device, we have tried to make it as easy as possible by putting enough space between icons and people seem pretty happy with the result... But in the end I guess it's a personal taste thing.

Duplicated content can definitely be an issue, however our experience so far is that goMobi sites seem to be doing quite well in SEO and ranking on Google. To make user experience even more seamless, goMobi provides free code that you can easily integrate in your desktop site to detect mobile visitors and redirect them to the goMobi site: from a visitor's perspective, that means your main URL works fine both on desktop and mobile (in the end, as long as you get the job done nobody will come and argue about the goMobi site technically being on a different domain).

Finally, as I mentioned before we actually did put quite a lot of effort in ensuring that goMobi provides the best possible experience on any kind of mobile device, very much thanks to the DeviceAtlas technology. However, if you do have specific examples of things not working as they are intended, I would be very happy to address them with our team.

Thanks!

Francesco

[forbairt]

I've just done up a short (20 minutes) walk through video of the whole system

http://blip.tv/blacknightsolutions/q...gomobi-5996623

Afterwards I did a quick check on the amount of data loaded for my main site and my mobile site.
41KB (for my goMobi site) vrs. 842KB (for my main site if I had some more info on the site it'd probably be a over 1MB)

Now given a lot of data plans are rather limited that's a pretty hefty site to go downloading and I wouldn't think my main site is that different from a lot of websites these days. You can go into creating responsive websites and so on but they'll all have overheads and be loading a hell of a lot of data. If you're just after the basic details this makes a lot of sense.

[mh76]

Hi Adrian

Site looks great....I notice you have your main site redirecting to your mobile site when viewed on a mobile...can you tell me how you did that? I've built a mobile site at m.hopkins-financial.ie but I'd really love to have an auto detect to direct to the correct version of the site.

cheers

Mark

[forbairt]

Hi Adrian

Site looks great....I notice you have your main site redirecting to your mobile site when viewed on a mobile...can you tell me how you did that? I've built a mobile site at m.hopkins-financial.ie but I'd really love to have an auto detect to direct to the correct version of the site.

cheers

Mark

Hi Mark,

When you're in the goMobi builder when you click finish down the bottom of the page you're taken to another page and this includes code php / javascript and various others that you can put into your existing website and if it detects a mobile it'll redirect

Hope that helps,
James

[mh76]

Thanks James

I've stuck the javascript code into the header but it doesn't seem to work...does it take some time to update? Or maybe its cos I've got google analytics code in there too?

thanks for the help!

mark

[forbairt]

What is your site please and I can try taking a quick look

[mh76]

Pension, Life Assurance, Income Protection Advice - Home Page

thanks