The AWS Blog

After many long internal discussions about content, a few revisions to the design, and extensive discussions with industry experts on a few of our favorite forums, the AWS Mobile Website has finally launched at http://mobile.awecommwebstrategies.com.

QUICK HINT: If you click that link in a normal browser, don’t expect it to look great.

If you haven’t been following the story, it all started with my hellish cab ride experience when a potential customer pulled up our not-so-mobile-device-friendly website on his BlackBerry.

We’ve been doing mobile sites for a while, but the most recent version of our website hadn’t been made to be mobile-friendly at that point. We learned our lesson.

The broader lesson is that right now, people are using the web on all kinds of devices in all kinds of ways. If a website renders in a less-than-friendly way on a cell phone, BlackBerry, Treo, or any other mobile device, chances are it’s ignoring the needs of some of its visitors.

As we did our research, held our internal discussions, and talking to our friends throughout the industry, we came to a few conclusions. One is that none of us are sold on the idea that the content that is developed for a standard-browser website can address the needs of mobile users.

I love the idea behind a truly browser and device agnostic website, but we’re just not there yet in many ways. People’s appetite for content on mobile devices is smaller, navigation needs to be completely different, and functionality that we offer to standard users is often useless to mobile device users.

So the whole “the content should be the same, and your presentation layer should just render it correctly on whatever browser/device is used” is pretty much out the window … for now.

The other conclusion that we made is that actually getting mobile device users to the mobile website is a complex issue in itself (I’ll follow up on that one in another post; we’re still cranking on it).

Quite a few of our customers are already jumping at the idea of having a mobile-friendly website, so I’ll follow this post up with some short case studies and screenshots of their mobiles sites as they go live.

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I love DrudgeReport.com. At least one browser on each of my computers is set to use it as the homepage, and my Blackberry is setup the same way.

I spend at least a half hour to an hour every day reading Drudge on my Blackberry. It’s fast, it points me right to the important articles, and it’s simple to navigate for the most part. There’s one problem though; those damn links at the bottom of each column! You can click the thumbnail on the right for a full view of what people see on a Blackberry (it’s not exact, but you’ll get the point).

Basically, you get one group of headlines, then a huuuuuge list of links to other news sites, then the second list of headlines and another huuuuuge list of links, and finally the last group of headlines. On a normal browser it renders correctly so all of the headlines are at the top, and all of the links are at the bottom.

Not so on a mobile device. The window is only wide enough to display one column at a time, so one column stacks on top of the next.

MATT - There’s an easy fix!! Put your content in one table, and your links in the table below it, and viola! The columns from the article table will stack on top of each other when it renders on a small browser window, and I won’t have to scroll through all of the links at the bottom of the first column to get to the articles at the top of the second one.

It’s twenty three flicks of the scroll wheel on a Blackberry to get to the second set of articles (I counted). Do it for my index finger, Matt.

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