MobileStartup.com

If you are doing any mobile website development where you are using device detection or adaptive content, you know how unreasonable it is to use a mobile phone/device to test your site live. There are a few plugins that you can use with Firefox that allow you to basically emulate a live mobile device. These shouldn't be used in place of actual live device testing but for testing while developing, these have been invaluable to me.

Firefox Plugins:

• wmlbrowser - Add WML markup support to your browser.

• XHTML Mobile Profile - Add xHTML MP support to your browser.

• User Agent Switcher - Use this plugin to send the user-agent string of whichever mobile browser you want to emulate. Try a diverse range of user-agents to make sure your app can handle all the different formats.

• ModifyHeaders - Allows you to spoof headers. Use this to add an x-up-subno, x-wap-profile, etc. header to your browser session so your app thinks you are coming from a network operators proxy.

With these few Firefox plugins you can get close enough to looking like whichever mobile device you'd like without having to suffer the delay of testing with a real phone.

The importance/relevance of top level domain names for mobile has come up recently in a few discussions with peers who are building mobile websites. I've been asked quite a few times if I thought it was important for someone launching a mobile site to purchase a .mobi domain for their site. I've given this a lot of thought lately and have discussed the benefits of having specific domain names for a mobile site with colleagues and have come to form the following opinion about domain names in regard to mobile sites:

The domain name of your mobile site is only relevant insomuch that it is relevant to mobile search engines. So the top level domain (i.e. .com, .net, .mobi) probably doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

Here's my argument; domain names are not a good way of addressing content. Entering a domain name into your desktop browser is an easy thing to do, and if you are not sure of the spelling or can't remember the address perfectly, it's no big deal to try until you get it right. Companies like Marchex are making bank on the fact that some people will just type in www..com when they are looking for information on whatever. This is not the case with a mobile browser. Mobile users are not going to risk entering a domain name that they don't know for sure is going to take them to the content they want. If the domain name is a long one they might not even be willing to enter it at all. No, the way that we navigate to content on mobile devices for the most part is going to be search. This is becoming clear and we are starting to see a lot of press and recent renewed focus on mobile search because of it.

So if the mechanism for finding information/content on a mobile browser is search, you need to be making sure your content is relevant, not your top level domain. While the mobile search engines do give weight to the words that appear in your domain name, it's apparent that they do not discriminate based on top level domains. Why would they. Having a .mobi TLD does not ensure that the content is mobile content, just look at http://pc.mtld.mobi . No, the way they determine the content type of your site is by looking at the doctype of your page. So if TLDs are irrelevant to the mobile search engines, the primary user interface for finding content, you are just as well off with a $.99 .info domain from GoDaddy as you are with the $18.99 .mobi domain for your mobile site.