Apple.com isn't mobile aware

ACCORDING TO mobile specialist, Bango, even though owners of the Apple Ithingey regualr surf the web, Apple.com itself isn't mobile friendly.

Other sites in Bango's Top Ten Turkeys are Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Microsoft. Which is a bit surprising given that The Beast offers Windows Mobile.

The tests were carried out using two fairly typical mobile handsets: - a Motorola V3 Razr and a Nokia 6300 on both AT&T in the USA and Vodafone in the UK. Bango used the Top 20 most trafficked PC websites as published by Nielsen Online.

In the Top Ten Best sites were – somewhat ironically - The Beast's MSN; Facebook; Google; Youtube; Ebay; and Yahoo.

As Bango's Anil Malhotra pointed out, "Our figures indicate that up to 10 out of every 100 customers are now routinely entering web addresses from their phones and hitting a site designed only with PC users in mind, which results in a bad experience."

Significantly, the company has also discovered that typically five per cent of visitors to PC web sites are now coming from mobile devices which is up from one per cent last year (2007).

Plus Bango points out that researcher, IDC, has calculated that around 1.3 billion people will be using a mobile device to connect to the web by Q1 2009. The vast majority of these are using handsets made by Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Samsung and, of course, Nokia.

Naturally, Bango has a solution – namely, find out how many visitors to your site are actually accessing it with mobile devices and discover what sort of browsers they are using.

The simple way to do this is to insert a few lines of code onto your site's front page which are supplied by Bango and called 'Analytics for PCs."

Once you've done that you can look at the data using Bango's online, real-time management tools. To do so, web owners need to sign up for what Bango calls its Early Access Program which can be found here.

It may well prove an enlightening experience because some web site owners might discover that as much as 10 per cent of their traffic is actually being generated by mobile devices, as Bango says. µ