1. Irish websites fail to embrace the mobile internet

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Aileen O'Toole, Managing Director, AMAS

Leading companies and government bodies have a poor mobile and PDA internet presence, according to research conducted by AMAS.

Increasingly, companies and public sector bodies have to factor convergence into planning and managing their online channels. With lines blurring between the offerings of telecoms, electronic media and web providers, and a greater array of devices in use by consumers to access online content, mobile and multi-channel access are becoming increasingly important.

A survey of 100 organisations, split evenly between public and private sectors, shows most have adopted a mainly defensive strategy to the mobile internet to date. A majority of both public and private companies have registered a .mobi mobile domain, presumably to protect their brands.However, fewer than five organizations appear to have used their mobile addresses and launched mobile websites.

Mobile internet graph

Existing websites from the sample do not display well on mobile browsers. The graph shows the scores on a .mobi tool which ranks sites on a scale of 1 – 5. A simple graphical interface, such as Google’s, would earn a score of five, for the clarity of its display on a mobile phone. A more cluttered and complex home page would earn a one in the .mobi test, as it would “definitely” display badly on a mobile.

None of the sites earned scored four or five. As shown in the graph, most get scores of either one or two, with 17 earning a score of three. A score of two means that a site will “probably” display poorly on a mobile, while three indicates that it will “possibly” not render well.

While mobile ratings were poor, a better picture has emerged in terms of use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). CSS is a series of instructions that specify how text should appear on a web page.

Used properly, CSS allows for some “future proofing” and for content to be more easily displayed across different platforms and browsers. All the public sector websites reviewed by AMAS passed the CSS test, with 13 of the private sector sites failing to use it.

Back to contents of State of the Net issue 6