Having WAP pages will be essential to your eCommerce business survival!
Saturday, December 29th, 2007When I arrived back to UK in 2004 my first need was to get myself an Internet Communication Device. So I purchased Dell Axim X30 Pocket PC running on Microsoft Windows for Pocket PC 2003 operating system.
It was enough for my needs as it had MS-Excel and MS-Word installed. Adobe had PDF reader for Pocket PC to read necessary downloaded documents and e-books, my music collection was in MP3 anyway and I was able to play video clips, so this was perfect device for me.
I was able to email either using my hotmail account (which had WAP interface) POP3 account.
But the problem was using it for internet browsing. Brighton (where I lived) was fully covered with WiFi stations so Internet Access wasn’t a problem. Besides two professional free networks – “pier to pier” and “loose connection”, there where usually over 26 nearby WiFi stations when in the city.
MSN, Yahoo and Google provided me nice WAP compatible interface for internet search but the problem started when I click to the sites. The browser usually crashed having either invalid HTML code or unsupported Flash objects as mobile browsers can support only Flash Lite.
This problem dates back to 1997-1998 when Internet went to mainstream.
From Academic group of IT professionals we had developed the HTML language to describe and link documents and search engines to find those documents. Suddenly everyone wanted to be Web Designers with their Flashing websites and “About Us” buttons. They even put the navigation menu to the left side of the screen which was most inconvenient for right handed computer users. Surely they lack skills to write proper program (HTML) code and later all those websites needed SEO specialists to get them even visible by search engines.
As mobile devices where much more limited and less developed than PC, improper coding and design issues where affecting previously built websites to be working on mobile devices.
Beginning of the mobile era, applications where built using Wurfl library to detect device capabilities and match the screen output for those, but for the moment websites based on XHMTL-MP standards should run on Nokia devices at least. However XHTML-MP lacks several characteristics like Frames, positioning in CSS, embedded objects, etc.
Opera Mini and Mobile and Apple Safari used in iPod and iPhone where much more advanced to develop W3C recommendations and even work using XSLT to format XML data.
The second problem will be much smaller screen sizes. So having several columns for different content in the screen could be practically impossible to fit. So, Iscreen formatting using TABLE tags could be not useful when developing WAP pages.
The screen could fit only 4 icons sized 35×35 pixels so we should reduce either the icon size to 15×15 pixels or find other ways. By Doing it old way having the bottom or upper menu in as linked text “| home | page1 | page 2 | page 3 |” could be much more appropriate in mobile screens as those are vertical not horizontal as PC monitor was.
Banners seem to have now smaller standards for mobile environment even the text advertisements are currently more common. Current standards are: Small (112×20 pixels), Medium (167×30 pixels), Large (215×34 pixels) and X-Large (305×64 pixels).
I have been asking around a longer period a question does anyone have plans to develop WAP interface for their eCommerce operations but so far haven’t got much positive answers. There haven’t been not a single WAP interface related projects in guru.com and as I did not get any single answer to my question “Does anyone have plans to develop WAP pages?” in LinkedIn eCommerce thread, so are we missing something?
Mobile browsing is estimated to be exceeding internet browsing by 2012!!!
Vodaphone introduced their Internet WAP gateway early this year which supposed to convert Internet WEB pages to mobile WAP standards but that’s not the answer for the problem. I still want to use Internet with my PDA and WiFi connection. Meanwhile I just have sent unsatisfied customer reports to Google and Microsoft that they should exclude non working web pages when I perform search from mobile browser. Seems, that now those companies has been finally taken my complaints seriously and incompatible websites will be excluded.
When Invest NI wasn’t able to support my SVG animation project they recommended me to earn enough money as “Website Designer”. I immediately found my market niche by offering WAP interface programming and design skills but to my surprise, I haven’t found any interest. I did CSS modules to Microsoft Sharepoint based project management application for £150 and was invited to attend to WAP design seminar in London which was priced £495??? For £495 I could be more than happy using my skills to write proper WAP interface for your eCommerce product but not to learn XHTML programming basics. Is that again suppose to be nine month it project?
So what the reason not to have mobile browser access to your eCommerce operations?
