Mobile Web opens up a whole new market

For small business owners starting out with a new website, there are certain fundamentals about conducting business online that are worth researching. One such opportunity is the mobile web, which is becoming one of the fastest growing areas online, and is worth keeping a watchful eye on.

The mobile web is predicted to take over desktop web access in upcoming years; however, larger businesses are failing to realise this and aren`t allocating their marketing tools in that direction. Thus, this stands out as a viable opportunity for smaller businesses to make their goods and services available to the public via the mobile web and grab potential customers away from the larger brands.

The market share of search engines on the mobile web is similar to that of the desktop. Google leads, while Yahoo and Microsoft (view screenshot illustrations) follow closely behind. There are, however, opportunities open to Yahoo and Microsoft to up their game for mobile search by creating new products in this less established arena. The market is there, and growing every day. In the UK, users downloaded 8 billion pages to their web-enabled phones during 2003 (source), and that was 5 years ago. Since then, the market has expanded widely. Even though the US is slightly behind the UK in mobile web usage, 21.6 million people managed to access the web via their mobiles over the course of one month in 2005. That`s a large market to cater for.

It isn`t difficult to access the mobile web, but one of the “problems” with it is whether the web design is compatible and effective on a handheld device. It isn`t an easy process to design for the mobile web, especially because the variety of screen sizes, devices, user agents and operating platforms are quite extensive. There is now even voice search on most enabled phones; Google and Microsoft offer answers to spoken queries given over the phone, and it looks like Yahoo has something similar in the pipeline.

The fact that there are almost triple the amount of mobile phones as there are PCs worldwide, shows that the opportunities open to the market are phenomenal, as practically all phones on the market today are web-enabled. It is easy to use, easy to access and very convenient, and much more tempting than having to lug around a laptop with you everywhere you go. There are a few limitations, however, that cause drawbacks for mobile web users, such as small screen size, being unable to open more than one window at a time. There isn`t much flexibility in navigation, not all pages are accessible, the speed of service is quite slow, some pages are broken, or are compressed and the size of email messages is limited.

It is predicted that by 2010, half of the planet`s population will have access to the internet through a mobile device, thereby making it an essential part of our lives. It`s highly recommended that small business owners who are starting up a website get their fingers in a piece of the mobile pie, before the big brands eat the whole pie.