With the availability of sophisticated HTML5 development platforms, capable of generating mobile web applications and mobile web sites with functionality and user experiences almost identical to native apps, mobile web sites and web apps have become viable solutions.

Once a site-owner or business has decided that the best strategy forward is to build a mobile web site or web app, instead of a native app, there are more decisions that need to be made. While a mobile-optimized web site may be the preferred solution, many site-owners and businesses do not have the funds to build a full-blown mobile optimized web site from scratch and therefore need alternate inexpensive solutions.

There is no single design strategy that works for all businesses so the mobile web site development strategy will differ from project to project. In any case, a site owner must decide whether to let customers interact with its existing site via mobile, adapt an existing site to mobile or create a mobile-optimized site from scratch.

Typically, there are three scenarios that drive the requirements and development directions of a mobile web site:

• The project is a new web site development plan that needs both a desktop and mobile web site
• The project is a redesign of an existing web site that now also needs a mobile web site
• The project is a complete new mobile web site that can be added to a desktop web site

Each of these scenarios will lead to a different approach and drives a different set of requirement.

Mobile Web Site Development Approach

Before a web site development project can start the web site developer needs to know the business objectives as they relate to the web site and specifically to the mobile web site.

There are many challenges mobile web developers need to overcome when designing for smartphones, including the small screen (often with tiny text), slower downloads, the lack of a physical keyboard for data entry, and mouse for item selection. In addition, there are no mouse buttons to issue commands and access to contextual menus is limited to touch screen only signals.

Mobile phone users often struggle using web sites that were initially designed for the desktop, even on the latest iPhones and Android-powered smartphones. Ideally, to solve those problems, websites must provide special mobile versions, but often, due to budget constraints, more affordable inexpensive alternatives are used. Here is a rundown of the various options that are often used:

Tweak Regular Web Site

The most basic and easiest way to access web site content on a smartphone is to tweak the regular web site for proper display on mobile devices. This means at the minimum that users can access the information they need, with a user “feel” as close as possible to desktop experience. Basic adjustments to the text size and viewport can be implemented to affect the way the web site displays on a mobile device. This approach is easy to implement with minimal effort. Using the site may be frustrating for users because they have to navigation through large amounts of content using the zoom function and deal with slow download speeds.

Adaptive Layout

When implementing the adaptive layout approach designers basically create one mobile web design and then adapt it to the various mobile devices the site must be rendered on. The basic structure of the site will be the same across all devices, but specific elements, such as image sizes, needs to be automatically adjusted to fit all display resolution and devices. Adaptive layouts need to work with the content already available on the web site. This means that the source order and mark-up plays a vital role in providing a logical order to content when linearize for the narrow layouts. Designers will also need to take into consideration that images will need to scale-to-fit as their containing elements adapt to different layouts.

Adaptive layout is very good at addressing design considerations and adjusting for different screen sizes, however it does not always address bandwidth and performance limitations of mobile devices.

A web design based on adaptive layout will often use CSS media queries, which have gained in popularity since browser vendors began supporting the W3C’s CSS-3, to style the page according to specific rules, for instance width, height, device width and height, orientation and more.

Dedicated Mobile Website

The ideal approach to mobile web site design is to create one separate, high-end version with simplified navigation, fewer features and stripped down content for mobile phones with full-browsers, that works solely on iPhone or Android-powered mobile devices. This means that any content and functionality that is not absolutely necessary has been be eliminated.

A web site dedicated to mobile users aims to deliver an optimized mobile experience that can take on a life of its own and often requires a lot of research and analysis in order to prioritize and deliver the most important content to users.

Site properties such as images are typically kept to a minimum, common tasks and key navigational paths are highlighted to give users exactly what they want. Despite the extra work, the result can be greatly improved performance, and a more streamlined experience that puts the most important features and content at the user’s fingertips. However, mobile-optimized sites are relatively expensive to build and maintain because site assets must be optimized and content prioritized.

When designing a dedicated mobile website it is important to enforce the brand identity of the “full desktop site” and transfer the most visually significant elements from the desktop site to the mobile site. Also, because mobile sites do not render colors and background the same as desktop or laptop monitors, designers must make sure the backgrounds and text colors provide adequate contrast so that the content can be read easily. Page load speed matters on all websites; they matter even more on mobile sites. This is probably one of the most important usability options to take into consideration when building a mobile web site. Web developers must give the highest priority to low page weight with limited the use of images, when designing a mobile web site.

Testing as Mobile Web Site

As with any web site development project, mobile web sites need to be tested on as many mobile devices as possible. Without owning all these devices, it can be somewhat tricky to find ways to accurately test for each. It will involve a combination of installing the developer SDK for the platform (like the iPhone SDK and Android SDK) and using web-based emulators for viewing on other mobile platforms.

One route to developing a mobile ecommerce website, adopted by one-third of retailers, is to use one of the many mobile application development platforms that offer online tools for building customized mobile web sites and apps for iPhone and Android-powered smartphones. This strategy has pros and cons. It allows a retailer to launch a mobile commerce offering quickly, with minimal technical expertise, but due to the nature of the proprietary platform there is often no option to expand the functionality beyond what is offered through the platform, which limits an online retailers’ ability to differentiate and keep up with innovation in the fast-changing mobile landscape.

Another common path, which is taken by about one-quarter of online retailers, is to extend their existing ecommerce website to the mobile realm. There are at least three ways to accomplish this, including building a new custom mobile ecommerce web site and integrate this site with the current back-end technology and business processes. This is an approach often taken by large retailers with in-house resources and IT staff or those online retailers that can afford to hire an external website development company specializing in building mobile web sites and apps. The downside to the latter approach is that upfront development and ongoing maintenance costs will be required. Source

ZenithOptimedia, the research arm of Publicis Groupe, last month dialed back its spending growth forecast from 14.4% to 14.2 %; still a respectable growth number. WPP’s GroupM still expects online ad spending to grow between 15% to 16% a year through 2012. These projections obviously do not reflect any negative impact, if any, from last weeks stock market plunge and the US credit rating downgrade by S&P.

MagnaGlobal, a strategic media research firm maintains that even with this latest economic scare the rate of innovation around the Internet will remain strong and as a result online advertising spend still looks pretty secure. The company expects that online advertising revenue will continue to rise from 17.3 percent ($30.1 billion) of total ad revenues to 22.4% ($47.4bn) in the next five years.

However, if we have learned one thing from the financial collapse of 2008 and the following recession, it is that even online advertising is not immune to a major downturn in the larger economy. We have to wait and see how this plays out in the comings weeks and months. Source

CollegeBudget, which is only for college students and requires a “.edu” email address to sign up, has already 600,000 college student members since it launched its private beta in March of this year, claims to have saved college students over $1 million collectively.

CollegeBudget will, on average, be taking a 40% cut from deals it sells but will assist merchants in promoting their deals on the platform through social media marketing campaigns at no cost. Merchants signing up to offer student deals receive a YouTube testimonial video made by a college student, as well as social media blasts to CollegeBudget’s 130,000 plus Facebook fans and 3,000 Twitter followers. Source

Griptonite Games, one of the acquired companies, employs about 200 people and is known for its console game and Nintendo DS development, but will now focus primarily on social games for mobile devices. Blammo Games, has already partnered with Glu in the past on social game development projects.

Both of the acquisitions where paid for in stock.

Free-To-Play Smartphone Games Are Outselling Packaged Software Games
Sales of traditional, packaged software games are getting killed by the play-for-free mobile game offerings. As a result video games revenues dropped by 10% in June of this year, according to market research firm NPD Group. One of the reasons for the decline is the hefty average $40 price traditional game publishers and developers are charging gamers for packaged software games. But the biggest impact is caused by gamers shifting from handheld devices, such as the Nintendo DS and 3DS, to iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices.

Facebook Is Enhancing User Discovery Of Social Games
Facebook is planning on updating the algorithms that drive the discovery methods it is using to filter game stories so that they are shown only to users that actually are actually playing social games.

Beyond 2011 the product road map calls for the engineering team to look at new game platform features that may work for Facebook, like voice chat and text chat.

Daily Deal Clones Ripe For Acquisition
A study by M&A outfit 451 Group has revealed that daily deal clones are ripe for acquisition. So far this year there have been 36 acquisitions worldwide with Groupon as the most active acquirer; gobbling up 20% of the clones. 96% of the daily deal sites that were acquired were founded 2 years ago and 63% started out in 2010.

AmazonLocal Launches in Groupons’ Home-town Chicago With The LivingSocial Sales Force Selling Its Deals
Two months after a soft launch in Boise, Idaho, Amazon expanded its daily deal offering AmazonLocal to Chicago, the home town of daily deal giant Groupon. But wait, selling daily deal offerings to local merchants requires “boots on the ground” in the form of a large local sale force calling on small businesses and Amazon is a pure online company. That’s where LivingSocial, a Groupon rival in which Amazon made a major investment, comes in. For now, to get AmazonLocal from the ground, sales people from LivingSocial are roping in the merchants for the AmazonLocal daily deal offerings. But down the road Amazon is planning to hire its own sales force and that could mean Amazon will be competing against its own investment partner, LivingSocial.

Dealmap, which was founded in May of 2010, claims to have 2 million users and 85 million visitors who visit its partner network each month. Dailymap taps a total of 450 sources which are making available over 400,000 local daily deals a day.

For the time being, Google will honor the existing partner deals that are in place with over 50 distribution partners, including Local.com, MerchantCircle, T-Mobile, Microsoft’s Bing. Source

We can imagine that, even without ad buying and targeting, Webtrends Social will be appealing enough for businesses that are currently managing their Facebook campaigns themselves using one of the other available services, to give it a try. For extended functionality and more users Webtrends charges $250.00 for a mid-tier service and up to $3,000.00 for an enterprise service.

With players like Involver, Buddy Media, Syncapse, Vitrue, Context Optional, Wildfire, and other social media management platforms already active in this space consolidation to may be four to five serious players is only a matter of time. Source

As with many other Groupon partnership deals Foursquare will receive an undisclosed cut from the Groupon deal earnings. Foursquare will be rolling out Groupon Now deals first in Chicago today and to other parts of the US and Canada by Sunday.

Foursquare and Groupon has been in discussion about this partnership since May of the year. Source

Gannett’s strategy is to push the daily deal service in the local media it owns, both online and traditional using the considerable local sales force of its newspaper and broadcast properties that knows the local markets, the communities, and their respective needs.

Deal Chicken is similar to other online daily deals services. People sign up to get a daily email that alert them to specific discounted deals for area retailers or restaurants. The discounts are then activated based on the number of subscribers who purchased the coupon. Gannett takes a 50% cut – although it varies – and passes the rest on to the merchant.

With Deal Chicken, Gannett is trying to diversify its revenue base beyond print advertising. The publisher of USA Today and 81 other U.S. daily newspapers has been battered by a downturn that has been particularly tough on its industry. Source