Mobile domain provider dotMobi has “evaluated” the top 100 sites on the internet to see how “mobile ready” they are.
Using a list generated by Alexa Internet on January 23, 2007, dotMobi evaluated the most visited sites using its own testing tool that incorporates industry standards set by the W3C consortium and investors including Ericsson, Microsoft and Nokia.
The tool at http://ready.mobi simulated a mobile device and accessed each of the top 100’s PC-based web page and its .mobi (or other mobile) address, if applicable. The report follows a stringent assessment, and scores each site from one (least mobile ready) to five (most mobile ready).
According to this scale, the top 10 mobile ready sites are Google.com, WashingtonPost.com, Ask.com, Yahoo.com Flickr.com, Live.com, Facebook.com, Overstock.com, Weather.com and USA Today.com. Only three of the top 10 most popular Web sites – Yahoo, Google and Facebook – scored greater than a three out of five on the Mobile Ready Report.
But how independent is the test? dotMobile itself said that sites that used a .mobi address tended to score well because “they generally followed the dotMobi standards and best practices to ensure an optimal mobile experience”.
The report indicated that many of the otherwise top web sites are not optimised for easy mobile viewing by consumers. These top 100 sites averaged a score of 1.3 out of five. On average, just the home pages of the tested sites cost 0.75p and took just under 40 seconds per page to download.
Consumer research has consistently shown that a site’s page structure, appearance, download cost and download speed are primary reasons why users avoid accessing the web on their mobile phone.
No surprisingly for a company whose interest is to promote dotMobi addresses, dotMobi say that the results show that the .mobi domain provides the best route to a mobile-ready website.
“There’s plenty of room for improvement because the mobile internet is still developing,” said Neil Edwards, CEO of dotMobi. “The results indicate that consumers will most likely not have a good experience when they want to view their favourite sites from a mobile phone. The .mobi domain provides a viable, easy-to-manage platform for even the most popular sites to optimise their content for mobile phones.”