According to recent studies and surveys over 50% of all smartphone traffic in the U.S. now comes from iPhones (AdMob Mobile Metrics, March 2009). And it’s growing. Other platforms are starting to catch on, but Apple truly succeeded in building and proliferating a means for people to have a vastly improved mobile web experience. Add to that a rabid user-base and the result is that iPhone’s Safari browser now starts showing up more and more on the overall analytics reports when companies review what browsers are accessing their sites. As an avid iPhone user myself since the first version I’ve been amazed at how I could navigate sites on this platform despite site designs that still required extensive zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth. I was so enamored that Apple designed UI mechanisms to help accommodate sites not designed for mobile that for a while I was simply excited to be able to use them at all. But slowly some sites began creating better mobile versions to make navigation even easier on the iPhone and other browsers. Now I grow greatly annoyed when I try to access a web site from my phone and find myself staring at a microscopic version of the homepage which makes it difficult to even find the buried link that says “Contact Us” just so I can find their address or phone number to get directions and a map while I’m out and about. Or even worse, the site is built in Flash with no HTML version and for whatever divine reason Apple has still not decided to support Flash on the iPhone. So the site is essentially useless on my phone and in some cases looks uglier than a Nip/Tuck season finale. I found it funny when I tried looking at the web sites of some of our competitors, some large digital agencies, and found they had sites built in Flash which are rendered useless on my device.

Numerous solutions exist for creating mobile presentation layers for even the most complex and transactional web sites to handle every different mobile device under the sun. We’ve helped many of our customers do exactly that. But there wasn’t a simple, fast and inexpensive way for a large majority of companies who just have a typical web site with typical CMS needs managed by a small number of people to easily publish and manage simple mobile site versions. With all this in mind, Definition 6 worked to build some simple scripts, toolsets and templates that integrate directly into a Content Management System enabling re-purposing of content by a non-technical marketing manager to easily deploy a site that looks great in an iPhone Safari browser. It leverages iPhone navigation mechanisms, and helps you to offer mobile users with the experience they desire and the information they likely need while mobile which is often quite different than what they want when they are sitting in front of a laptop or desktop computer. We’ve also packaged it all up in a simple series of offerings to make this an easy decision for our current and future customers so they can cost effectively begin to meet the needs of a growing market. If you don’t have an iPhone you can test to see what your site looks like using an iPhone simulator which we have posted at http://www.definition6.com/our-services/mobile.aspx and if you do have an iPhone just visit www.definition6.com now on your device to see an example.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll also be releasing the same kind of CMS plug-ins and templates for other mobile browsers as add-ons to these tools. But we thought we’d start with the one that represented the most traffic. For a quick and simple way to manage mobile sites in a CMS we think this new toolset makes great sense for a large number of businesses.