Four Strategies for Addressing the Mobile Web Opportunity

Learn more about Dynatrace

eBay has projected that revenues from their mobile presence, driven largely by mobile apps, will hit $4 billion in revenues in 2011, up from $2 billion in 2010. Mobile has arrived and is accelerating in a big way across industries like retail, financial services, travel and entertainment. Furthermore, internet industry leaders like eBay, Yahoo! and Facebook are increasingly setting the bar for what defines a “good” mobile web experience. To capitalize on the mobile web opportunity, you need to make your site's mobile user experience as fast, reliable, high-quality and user-friendly as possible.

Businesses can select one of four options when developing and implementing a mobile web strategy: offer your existing website to mobile device users; create mobile-specific landing pages with very basic functionality; leverage a service to selectively filter your main site content across various mobile platforms; or create a mobile optimized version of your site.

This article will examine the pros and cons of each approach, and show why creating a mobile optimized version of your site offers compelling benefits in terms of designing specifically for the mobile user, capitalizing on mobile-specific capabilities and directly (and proactively) managing the mobile user experience.

1. Offer your existing website to mobile device users

While the content on a typical site is growing richer, this may be an option if you have a very simple web design that doesn’t contain heavily used rich media, sophisticated navigation or other advanced capabilities. This approach may offer cost-effectiveness as well as simplicity from a code maintenance standpoint, but there are substantial risks to consider.

First, your existing website may not appear properly on many mobile device screens, making your site content inaccessible to many mobile users. If mobile users come to your main site and have a poor experience, don’t expect them to stick around. A recent survey found that mobile users do not have much patience for retrying a website or application that is not functioning initially – a third will go to a competitor’s site instead.

Second, you may need to adjust your main website in order to accommodate mobile users – making it extra lightweight, getting rid of any flash content and using big buttons and big links. This imposes limits on the feature-richness and functionality for your main website, but these attributes that distinguish your website can pose significant usability, navigation and screen real estate issues on mobile devices. You can also lose the opportunity to connect with your customers through mobile-specific capabilities like geolocation.

2. Create mobile-specific landing pages with very basic functionality

Free resources such as Google Sites can create pages that allow mobile users to quickly place calls to your physical store, or determine your closest store location. Similar to offering your existing website to mobile users, this approach may be a cost-effective option. But considering the popularity of smartphones and tablets and the fact that mobile users are becoming savvier in augmenting their on-the-go shopping experiences with these devices, there’s potentially a lot to be lost.

Throughout the shopping experience, users leverage their devices to do everything from buying products, to locating where gifts are sold, to comparing prices and reading product reviews. Mobile shoppers want spontaneous, instantly gratifying mobile web interactions, and retailers need to create experiences that are in tune with these expectations.

If your competitor delivers a rich, fast mobile web experience matching the excellence of a PC, they’re sure to capture more buyers than your page offering only very basic “place a call” or “find a store” functionality. Mobile landing pages simply don’t satisfy requirements for fuller functionality, which today’s sophisticated consumers have come to expect.

3. Leverage a service to selectively filter your main site content across various mobile platforms

Services like Digby and Usablenet offer high-performing, reliable and secure platforms which can extend your website content and functionality across a constantly expanding and changing spectrum of mobile devices. There’s an added advantage that no client IT resources and no extra web development specifically for mobile are required.

While there are efficiencies to be gained from using a service like this to ingest content from your main website and disseminate it across mobile phones, reliance on someone else’s platform means you relinquish some direct control over the quality of your mobile users’ experiences. With the stakes for strong mobile web performance so high – 60 percent of consumers expect mobile site downloads in just three seconds or less – some businesses aren’t willing to go this route without commitments to performance service levels and transparency.

4. Create a mobile optimized version of your site

Creating a mobile optimized version of your site provides an excellent opportunity to tailor site content based on what your unique mobile users expect and want “on the go.” For example, you can design your mobile site to enable easy navigation with just a thumb for busy consumers who may be navigating your mobile site with one hand, while walking through an airport.

One rule of thumb for mobile-optimized sites is to “keep it clean” by reducing unnecessary “heavy” content, thereby maintaining or enhancing speed. If your main website features 50 or more sections and features, your mobile customers may only use three of these. You should select the key user scenarios, and streamline the experience through those.

Maximizing Mobile Site Performance

Creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of your site may also give you more direct control over the experience specific to the mobile user. Like your main website and its applications, the mobile web user experience depends on many factors both within and beyond your firewall, including ISPs, third party content and services, browsers and devices.

Real mobile user monitoring helps you proactively manage all of these elements by starting with a true view into the mobile user experience in various regions, and across various devices. From there you can trace back to identify and fix any “offending” elements which may impact users, ideally before they are even aware of any performance issues.

For example, if a regional ISP serving a significant user base is slow, you may need to lighten mobile site content further; or, if a particular mobile browser is downloading mobile site elements too slowly, you may need to reduce the number of connections.

There are also a number of free tools available to help ensure effective mobile user experiences – for example, Google Page Speed lets businesses assess site performance and get recommendations for improvements according to industry best practices. In addition, instant tests can let you quickly and easily see how your mobile site renders across the most popular devices.

While creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of your site does entail some additional development and code maintenance requirements, the overall task can be fairly cost-effective as it leverages the same development skillsets and techniques used for your main website.

For many businesses, the potential benefits of creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of one’s own site – tailoring content expressly to meet their mobile users’ unique functionality and speed requirements; connecting with users through specialized mobile capabilities; increasing confidence that mobile users can easily see and access site content; and proactively ensuring high-quality mobile user experiences – are worth the investment.

About Steve Tack

Steve Tack is CTO of Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) Business Unit, leading the expansion of Compuware's APM product portfolio and market presence. He is a software and IT services veteran with expertise in application and web performance management, SaaS, cloud computing, end-user experience monitoring and mobile applications. Tack is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and his articles have appeared in a variety of business and technology publications.

Related Links:

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Expands Unified APM for Chinese Market

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Integrates With Google Page Speed

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Delivers APM Innovations

Part One of the BSMdigest interview with Steve Tack

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Four Strategies for Addressing the Mobile Web Opportunity

Learn more about Dynatrace

eBay has projected that revenues from their mobile presence, driven largely by mobile apps, will hit $4 billion in revenues in 2011, up from $2 billion in 2010. Mobile has arrived and is accelerating in a big way across industries like retail, financial services, travel and entertainment. Furthermore, internet industry leaders like eBay, Yahoo! and Facebook are increasingly setting the bar for what defines a “good” mobile web experience. To capitalize on the mobile web opportunity, you need to make your site's mobile user experience as fast, reliable, high-quality and user-friendly as possible.

Businesses can select one of four options when developing and implementing a mobile web strategy: offer your existing website to mobile device users; create mobile-specific landing pages with very basic functionality; leverage a service to selectively filter your main site content across various mobile platforms; or create a mobile optimized version of your site.

This article will examine the pros and cons of each approach, and show why creating a mobile optimized version of your site offers compelling benefits in terms of designing specifically for the mobile user, capitalizing on mobile-specific capabilities and directly (and proactively) managing the mobile user experience.

1. Offer your existing website to mobile device users

While the content on a typical site is growing richer, this may be an option if you have a very simple web design that doesn’t contain heavily used rich media, sophisticated navigation or other advanced capabilities. This approach may offer cost-effectiveness as well as simplicity from a code maintenance standpoint, but there are substantial risks to consider.

First, your existing website may not appear properly on many mobile device screens, making your site content inaccessible to many mobile users. If mobile users come to your main site and have a poor experience, don’t expect them to stick around. A recent survey found that mobile users do not have much patience for retrying a website or application that is not functioning initially – a third will go to a competitor’s site instead.

Second, you may need to adjust your main website in order to accommodate mobile users – making it extra lightweight, getting rid of any flash content and using big buttons and big links. This imposes limits on the feature-richness and functionality for your main website, but these attributes that distinguish your website can pose significant usability, navigation and screen real estate issues on mobile devices. You can also lose the opportunity to connect with your customers through mobile-specific capabilities like geolocation.

2. Create mobile-specific landing pages with very basic functionality

Free resources such as Google Sites can create pages that allow mobile users to quickly place calls to your physical store, or determine your closest store location. Similar to offering your existing website to mobile users, this approach may be a cost-effective option. But considering the popularity of smartphones and tablets and the fact that mobile users are becoming savvier in augmenting their on-the-go shopping experiences with these devices, there’s potentially a lot to be lost.

Throughout the shopping experience, users leverage their devices to do everything from buying products, to locating where gifts are sold, to comparing prices and reading product reviews. Mobile shoppers want spontaneous, instantly gratifying mobile web interactions, and retailers need to create experiences that are in tune with these expectations.

If your competitor delivers a rich, fast mobile web experience matching the excellence of a PC, they’re sure to capture more buyers than your page offering only very basic “place a call” or “find a store” functionality. Mobile landing pages simply don’t satisfy requirements for fuller functionality, which today’s sophisticated consumers have come to expect.

3. Leverage a service to selectively filter your main site content across various mobile platforms

Services like Digby and Usablenet offer high-performing, reliable and secure platforms which can extend your website content and functionality across a constantly expanding and changing spectrum of mobile devices. There’s an added advantage that no client IT resources and no extra web development specifically for mobile are required.

While there are efficiencies to be gained from using a service like this to ingest content from your main website and disseminate it across mobile phones, reliance on someone else’s platform means you relinquish some direct control over the quality of your mobile users’ experiences. With the stakes for strong mobile web performance so high – 60 percent of consumers expect mobile site downloads in just three seconds or less – some businesses aren’t willing to go this route without commitments to performance service levels and transparency.

4. Create a mobile optimized version of your site

Creating a mobile optimized version of your site provides an excellent opportunity to tailor site content based on what your unique mobile users expect and want “on the go.” For example, you can design your mobile site to enable easy navigation with just a thumb for busy consumers who may be navigating your mobile site with one hand, while walking through an airport.

One rule of thumb for mobile-optimized sites is to “keep it clean” by reducing unnecessary “heavy” content, thereby maintaining or enhancing speed. If your main website features 50 or more sections and features, your mobile customers may only use three of these. You should select the key user scenarios, and streamline the experience through those.

Maximizing Mobile Site Performance

Creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of your site may also give you more direct control over the experience specific to the mobile user. Like your main website and its applications, the mobile web user experience depends on many factors both within and beyond your firewall, including ISPs, third party content and services, browsers and devices.

Real mobile user monitoring helps you proactively manage all of these elements by starting with a true view into the mobile user experience in various regions, and across various devices. From there you can trace back to identify and fix any “offending” elements which may impact users, ideally before they are even aware of any performance issues.

For example, if a regional ISP serving a significant user base is slow, you may need to lighten mobile site content further; or, if a particular mobile browser is downloading mobile site elements too slowly, you may need to reduce the number of connections.

There are also a number of free tools available to help ensure effective mobile user experiences – for example, Google Page Speed lets businesses assess site performance and get recommendations for improvements according to industry best practices. In addition, instant tests can let you quickly and easily see how your mobile site renders across the most popular devices.

While creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of your site does entail some additional development and code maintenance requirements, the overall task can be fairly cost-effective as it leverages the same development skillsets and techniques used for your main website.

For many businesses, the potential benefits of creating and supporting a mobile-optimized version of one’s own site – tailoring content expressly to meet their mobile users’ unique functionality and speed requirements; connecting with users through specialized mobile capabilities; increasing confidence that mobile users can easily see and access site content; and proactively ensuring high-quality mobile user experiences – are worth the investment.

About Steve Tack

Steve Tack is CTO of Compuware's Application Performance Management (APM) Business Unit, leading the expansion of Compuware's APM product portfolio and market presence. He is a software and IT services veteran with expertise in application and web performance management, SaaS, cloud computing, end-user experience monitoring and mobile applications. Tack is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and his articles have appeared in a variety of business and technology publications.

Related Links:

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Expands Unified APM for Chinese Market

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Integrates With Google Page Speed

Compuware's Latest News: Compuware Delivers APM Innovations

Part One of the BSMdigest interview with Steve Tack

Part Two of the BSMdigest interview with Steve Tack

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

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Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

No Escalations ≠ No Work: Why Visibility in DevOps Matters More Now That AI Is Accelerating Everything

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...