Mobile Sites Made Easy – Don't Overcomplicate Things – WAP Is A Snap!

Tue Dec 16, 2008 0 Comments

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the mobile WAP site efforts that Target & Wal-Mart have undertaken. However these two examples are pretty robust and took a decent amount of developer time and testing to get them to the point where they are today. But hope is NOT lost.

Anyone, even those marketers on a shoe-string budget, can get into the mobile game with a bare-bones WAP site. Toys “R” Us just launched a really straight forward, no nonsense mobile WAP site that is designed to highlight was is on sale within a local store (100% ShopLocal powered of course).

People always start thinking mobile web sites are really difficult, new and complicated. They are the furthest from that at the core. The WAP protocols / standards are basically a definition of how to simplify down web sites so that the sites will run properly on very basic mobile device web browsers.

This Toys “R” Us website is a great example as uses super common web coding / program standards from literally the 1997 era of web sites. It is just plain ‘ol HTML, a few graphics and hyperlinks. Any developer in their sleep should be able to turn out a basic WAP site. So what are you waiting for? Keep it simple and launch a stripped down mobile site. Get some customer feedback and then iterate and apply these learnings as the site grows and advances.