Take a look at several great newcomers to Mobify – as usual, we’re stunned by just how international our publishers are! Realtors from Quebec, Shoot Music from the United Kingdom, WebMaster Radio from Florida USA, bloggers from Bulgaria, RIPT Apparel from Chicago, Mahi-Mahi UI design from France… The list goes on! Good job everybody – let’s keep pushing the limits of what’s possible in mobile web design, making the mobile users happier!

Thanks to one of our talented users, Nima Akbarpour, Mobify got TV coverage on BBC Iran this week.

Here is the TV segment (skip to 19th minute): http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/tv/2008/12/000000_ptv_click.shtml

Thanks Nima & BBC – we’re proud to have amazing customers from all around the world!

While our team is hard at work building the next version of Mobify, publishers around the world are pushing the service to its limits.

Let’s welcome WebDesigner Depot (a top web design resource), legendary VIBE & Discover Magazines to the Mobify family. Different CMS systems, styles and audiences – but great mobile experiences throughout! Can you guess which one of the three has the largest mobile audience?

Note that Discover & VIBE are already serving mobile ads. In both cases this is done using DoubleClick’s DART ad server, which Mobify Pro enables to serve MMA-compliant mobile banner ads.

October is a very busy month here at Mobify, as we prepare to roll out the most significant update since launching earlier this Spring. The focus, confirmed by your feedback, is making the service easier to use and manage, while reducing the overall design time. Here are just some of the improvements you can expect:

• Better handling of major CMS systems (WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine and others) will make going mobile faster. We’ve collected a ton of data, thanks to our users creating mobile views for pretty much every CMS under the sun. This makes the Mobify algorithms smarter all the time, helping new users pick content best suited for mobile use.
• Revision control for sites with big mobile audiences. When the mobile version is serving tens of thousands of visitors every day, making hot-fixes and adjusting CSS shouldn’t be done on a live mobile view. In the past, this has been circumvented with the “duplicate” feature, but revision control will make it a lot more convenient.
• More help resources – community forums, screencasts, walkthroughs and webinars. Mobify is fairly straightforward – but there is an initial learning curve. We’ll make it easier by expanding training and help resources.

Thanks for choosing Mobify – hope you’re as excited about the new release as we are!

Accessing the Web from a mobile phone is not a new idea. Data transmission standards were defined in the early days of GSM – over a decade ago. The first round of mobile browser wars was fought long before devices had color displays. Transcoding solutions were deployed by browsers, carriers and even search engines like Google. In those days, getting readable Web content on a phone was a victory no matter how it looked – the baseline mobile experience was a blank page that never finished loading.

Enter the iPhone/Android/Palm Pre era. Most websites still really suck on mobile – research proves it – but one thing has changed drastically. The baseline mobile experience is surfing the desktop website using the pan & zoom approach. Now, any mobile publishing service has to provide an experience superior to accessing the full site on an iPhone-like device.

The overall impression visitors get is defined by look & feel, content accessibility, navigation and load times – items familiar to any mobile UI expert. However, not delivering on any one of them can provoke an “opt-out” by the mobile user, falling back to the cumbersome yet familiar full site experience.

Mobify measures opt-out rates for mobile views it powers. There is a strong correlation between the amount of thought a web designer puts into the mobile version and the size of their mobile audience. It’s incredibly pleasing to see the quality of the mobile views go up consistently. The future of mobile web gets brighter every time a web designer decides to take charge and improve experience for their visitors.

Screenshots: old baseline (Google Transcoder), new baseline (full site in Mobile Safari), current mobile design (m.spin.com by Mobify)