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Tag: mobile sites

Website Mobilization Tools Go Head To Head: DudaMobile vs MobeeArt

I don’t know about you, but I can barely leave my desk without grabbing my iPhone and bringing it with me. I know I’m not alone in this because as of May, more than half of U.S. mobile users have smartphones. Each day more people are interacting with websites, search results and advertisement via some type of mobile format. That is why it has become increasingly more important for businesses to make their websites mobile-friendly.

There are several companies offering services to mobilize your website quickly and easily. Two services that have caught my eye are MobeeArt and Dudamobile. Dudamobile has partnered up with Google to try to create a more mobile-ready internet, while MobeeArt boasts an intuitive “what you see is what you get” approach. Both claim to be the easy DIY place to mobilize your website as quickly as possible.

WYSIWYG Editor

MobeeArt offers a mobilization suite that is both feature-rich and claims to have an ease of use and intuitive navigation. The company offers two versions of their suite: a very simple editor that instantly mobilizes your website and a much more robust suite that I preferred.

The basic editor seems to be pretty par for the course as mobilization suites go. The view screen is cleverly phone shaped with basic options on the left hand side. The advanced editor, however, is a robust and visually comprehensive editor. The advanced editor allows you pull different items (photos, logos, text) from the desktop version to add to a custom-made page on the mobile site and tokenizes them to automatically sync with any changes that happen to the desktop site.

Dudamobile’s suite has a much more subtle difference between their basic and advanced editors. The visual representation remains “phone on the right; features on the left” regardless of whether you look at the basic or advanced editor. This caused certain difficulties later on in the process of mobilization.

Navigation

MobeeArt
During my testing, I found that while I enjoyed the robust feature set of the suite, I was very put off by the difficulty to find some of those features. Figuring out how to add the call tracking feature I wanted or where certain features lived inside the suite’s architecture proved to be quite the undertaking at times.

Navigating the website’s architecture, however, was incredibly easy in the Studio. The site’s skeleton was prominently displayed on the left hand side next to a visual representation of the website. The basic sitemap and relationships between parent and child pages are easily accessible.

Dudamobile
Dudamobile’s feature set is much more easily navigable than MobeeArt’s. Each feature has a small chiclet and menu label so finding that HTML box option isn’t a task unto itself.

Navigating through the pages of website, however, was incredibly difficult. I had to rely on either the navigation menus built into the site I was mobilizing or a small drop down menu that listed every single page that existed on the desktop version, regardless of whether I chose to use it in the mobile version. This made switching from one page to another somewhat of a chore.

Save Your Work!

MobeeArt
The advanced editor prominently displayed a save button so you would not lose your work. The basic editor seems to auto-save at a rate that is unknown to me, but didn’t make me worry about losing my work.

The suite, however, did crash on me multiple times while attempting to edit the website and I lost a lot of changes. Remember, kids: ALWAYS SAVE YOUR WORK!

Dudamobile
I can only assume this suite auto-saved a certain amount of my changes, but the save button was buried as a final step to creating your mobile website. This made me incredibly uncomfortable to leave the mobilization process to do anything. Getting nit-picky about the way your mobile website looks AND not being able to take a bathroom break makes for a pretty ornery user.

Optimization Features

MobeeArt
The editor had some integration with Google Analytics (very basic) and some of its own analytics, but I was pretty unimpressed by the offerings. Call tracking was nearly impossible and it was a task to put my own forms on the website. Additionally, as far as I could tell the suite did not provide canonical links.

Dudamobile
Dudamobile, on the other hand, automatically created canonical links to unique content. Since the company is partnered up with Google, all of the integration with Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and other SEO is fairly robust (albeit proprietary).

Final Thoughts

We are riding on the crest of the mobile wave and it is increasingly more important for us to recognize this. I don’t think the magic easy-to-use and SEO-conscious mobilization suite really exists yet. I had a lot of hair-pulling moments with both MobeeArt and DudaMobile that leave me wanting more from both suites.

While DudaMobile probably wins this head-to-head by skin of its SEO-conscious teeth, the MobeeArt studio definitely has a slight aesthetic edge over the cumbersome one our winner provides. For best results, go with Google and DudaMobile, but watch this space for future developments in website mobilization.

November 21, 2012
Mobile Site SEO: Pier 1 vs. Crate and Barrel

Over the past year, we’ve been fielding many questions related to mobile websites — and specifically mobile site SEO. Should I get a mobile site? Where do I get a mobile site? Will a mobile site bring me more business? How will a mobile site affect my SEO?

In the midst of working on some mobile site specific tasks this week, I also happened to be doing some online browsing / shopping on my mobile device (iPhone 4).

I went furniture shopping yesterday evening (you know, at a real store) and found a piece of furniture that I liked.

Later, I went on my phone, and instead of going straight to Pier 1’s site and navigating through all the other pieces of furniture, I went to Google, as most users tend to do these days out of convenience, and typed in “Pier 1 Mia Headboard” — I was thrilled to see a search result that would lead me straight to the product page.

I clicked on the result, and was let down when I was rerouted to the home page of their mobile site.

It’s no surprise they are looking to hire an SEO Specialist… too bad the job posting on LinkedIn doesn’t call for someone with mobile site experience.

On the other hand, I was also looking for Crate and Barrel bedding and did a similar search on Google.

When I clicked on the result, I was pleased to be immediately taken to the correct section on the site.

How can you be sure your mobile site is search engine friendly? There are a couple of different technical approaches to making mobile SEO happen, so stay tuned for a blog from the great Doug Thomas on how you can make it work best.

Have any examples of good or bad mobile sites that you love, or love to hate? Share with us! We just might use it in a future post on mobile website SEO!

Thanks to torley for the awesome lamp photo.

March 14, 2012
Mobile Search and Marketing – Catch the Wave, Surf With Style & Learn What The Path of Least Resistance Can Do For You

Welcome to the Internet — but look up, you’re about to crash! If you are surfing the web today, it’s likely that your surfboard of choice is your phone. Hopefully you’re not multi-tasking behind the wheel of a car, but smartphones can provide most people with extremely useful tools for everyday life. As for marketers, surf’s up! Phone marketing is the new big wave.

The dawn of the Internet brought a whole new meaning to the desktop. Instead of a work machine/second-rate gaming station, we gained a window into the whole world, with access to new games, programs, ideas, music, arts, niche news outlets, and fascinating people. There are free games, for surf’s sake! And no longer do free games mean Hearts, Mine Craft and Solitaire. We now have whatever we can get our downloads on to. And even if we want a game with a little more oomph, we no longer have to pay what now seems like a rip-off premium at our local retail national chain. We no longer have to buy what the retailers in our neighborhood are contracted to sell — the Internet lets us seek out what we want with hyper-specificity.

For marketers, these are vehicles for their product. Web page after web page is filled with banners, popups and text-based ad campaigns. Spam emails flood our inbox every morning. Of course there are some more appealing and friendly avenues, including blog content campaigns and the ever-important SEO; the potential for abuse is there, but there are subtle ways to do it. All of these tactics have been frequented by marketing professionals for the past fifteen years, and they have produced extremely successful results for businesses independent, corporate and all between.

The desktop is regaining its position as a work machine/game station, except every aspect of the desktop is now souped-up with the addition of the Internet. We may have a desktop that has a free copy of Open Office we grabbed online with a few clicks of the mouse, rather than a $249 copy of Microsoft Office. Even though Open Office is free, this very blog is being drafted on a licensed copy of Microsoft Word, because it’s already installed on my Mac. Why would I bother downloading what may or may not be sub-quality when my employer has already payed for this licensed copy of Microsoft Office on my machine? I could if I’d like, but again, why bother? Open-source is a draw, certainly. Maybe you will just prefer to use Open Office unless you’re in an environment where it is mandatory. I’d say that defies the path of least resistance. And that leads us to the trait we love about the Internet: it embraces the path of least resistance. It also has a pretty solid record of rewarding those individuals and entities that also embrace said path. So where am I heading with all this? Well, the path of least resistance: the mobile phone.

In 2012, the Internet is on our phone. If I’m riding along in a car with my friends and we want to know what’s on the menu at a restaurant we’ve never been to, are we going to stop at a friend’s house to use the computer or, worse, go there ourselves? Oh no. There are mobile phones in our pockets that will be telling us what’s on that menu. Even if the restaurant’s website (if they have one) is not mobile-friendly, there are a slew of menu sites out there that are optimized for people in our exact situation. The question is, which site is optimized for our phones? That is the question you need to ponder as well, even in the context of your own website or marketing campaign.

If you think that the Internet on the phone is only for those who are away from home, then you forget about the path of least resistance. If I want to know who plays “Spartacus” in the new season premiere, my friend on his Evo already has the answer before I’ve even lifted my laptop from the coffee table in front of me. With the phone, the Internet is either already in your hand or less than a foot away. Desktops are becoming less and less the vehicles of surf, regaining their position as just workstations and game systems. The mobile phone is the new vehicle of surf. It’s small. It’s simple. It’s easy. And if you care about your bottom line, you better hop on this wave, or find yourself on the rocks.

There are ways to prepare yourself for mobile phone marketing, like optimizing your website for mobile phones. To get into the real game, you can start testing out text marketing campaigns which are a real treat for bottom line as they are quick and easy for you to deploy. You can also engage with mobile phone-focused search engines. We will get into this and more in our next installment!

January 30, 2012