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While we believe that while platforms like the iPhone and the App Store are compelling, mobile web apps are the future. Sure the iPhone App Store is successful now, but as mobile devices get more sophisticated and more aligned to what people want, the age old mobile problem of device fragmentation once again rears its ugly head. The problem is supporting multiple native mobile app frameworks is both wasteful and costly. The mobile web is the only ubiquitous way to reach the over 4 billion people around the world with mobile handsets.

Your Mobile Web Strategy is not your Web Strategy

Creating a strategy specifically for mobile devices is nothing like creating a web strategy. There are many challenges of providing the best possible experience to the greatest number of devices. We know, we've spent the better part of our careers dealing with them.

For many years creating a great mobile web app experience was so costly it was out of reach for all but the biggest brands. But since the iPhone we've seen the cost and complexity drop significantly. But it isn't just about creating for the iPhone, it's about creating a mobile web app that looks great on the iPhone and the hundreds of other devices your customers use every day.

Let's find out how defined your mobile web strategy is.

Creating a great mobile web app user experience starts with great information architecture. To the user it needs to behave like an native application, but still retain the benefits and ease of use of the web. Finding this balance isn't easy, a challenge made even more difficult once you factor in the various types of mobile context.

Getting it right

Our approach to mobile information architecture is all about getting it right. This means we start with a map of all the initial goals and key interactions we think the user will face. Then we refine it over and over and over again, until we've boiled down the essence of the experience.

We prototype and field test the hell out of each Mobile IA, to make sure that it addresses the users' needs and context to create an intuitive and easy to use experience the user can't live without.

Not getting it right... well that can mean big and costly technical problems down the road, like content adaptation, which we seek to avoid at all costs.

Let's talk about how we will get people to their goals.

Designing a Mobile Web App isn't about designing one great interface for one device, it is about designing great experiences for multiple devices; about creating a look, a feel that persists, despite the capabilities of one particular handset.

We do this by taking the mobile information architecture which we interpret into designs and interactions that are relevant on multiple platforms. Sometimes this means inventing a new visual metaphor for one device and something else for another. But usually it just means being smart about the design.

We look for the essence of the app, the commonalities that don't depend on the capabilities of the device, and build a visual toolkit around it.

Simple Elegance

Great mobile UI design is about creating simple elegance. We work to find the balance between the native UI or chrome of the device and your brand. It's making the design feel as though it is a natural fit on the device it's viewed on, but remaining uniquely yours.

We don't just create a mobile design, but create a visual language for the mobile medium that can be adapted to whatever platform you choose to support.

Get in touch to start building a beautiful mobile interface.

With the design in hand, we start to put the pieces together, building out a scalable web platform to deliver your content to mobile devices. This can be done completely external to your systems using a secure content API, or it can be built on top your current infrastructure. This is done in two phases.

It's About Web Standards

The first step in mobile web dev is building the front end experience using web standard XHTML, CSS and Javascript, fully separating presentation from markup. Whenever possible we use the latest standards like HTML5, CSS3 and mobile friendly Javascript toolkits like jQTouch.

Baking the Back-end

The next step is architecting the back-end web application, either by tapping into your database, leveraging an API or creating our own architecture. We ensure that everything we build is reliable, scalable and built using standardized principles and development practices.

When we put both of these pieces of the puzzle together, our application starts to take shape - something we can put on to devices and begin to test, which is a whole other challenge.

Find out how we can leverage the mobile web to save money.

Porting and testing applications on multiple handsets is historically the greatest, most costly challenges of mobile development. This can be done the easy way or it can be done the hard way.

The Content Adaptation Conundrum

Content Adaptation is the process of creating multiple mobile experiences, each designed to provide the best possible experience on the device it is viewed upon. As you can imagine, this means for every device you support, you have a design, templates, alterations to the back-end and device testing that goes along with it. Essentially the more devices you support, the more it costs. As you might have guessed, this is the hard way.

The easy way is to build for the market you know about, that you know you can be successful in. Once that's established then port to the next most logical device. Then the next one. And the next one. This creates a cost effective pay-as-you-go strategy, putting your dollars where your users are. Using some of the inherent benefits of web standards, we can create easily adaptable experiences and offload the detection and rendering to the browser. It doesn't work for every device, but it is a cost efficient place to start.

Find out how we can extend your brand on multiple mobile platforms.

We design and build all our mobile web apps to be easily maintainable by our clients. We believe in a full and complete hand off to the client. We include all deliverables at no extra charge (at the request of the client), from our scanned sketches, Photoshop files and of course all code.

However in some instances the client doesn't have the resources to maintain their product. In these cases we provide the option to provide all support and maintenance either until you get a team in place, or indefinitely - it's up to you. In either case we provide flexible options to keep your app tip top.

Let's talk about the long term success of your mobile web app.