We love covering success stories of web designers going mobile. Today we caught up with Aaron Maxwell, president of Hilomath, a fast-growing mobile web development agency out of San Francisco. Their key offering is a mobile website upgrade service they called MobileWebUp. It’s tailored to clients that already have a substantial web presence, and suddenly realize it needs to also work well on mobile.
Mobify: What made you start designing for mobile?
Aaron: Having developed web apps in Silicon Valley for years, I was ready to start my own agency and build a team of designers and engineers. The question was what business focus would have potential for growth in the coming years, as well as making an important contribution to small and mid-sized businesses (a sector I personally enjoy working with).
One day while quietly sitting and mulling it over, it somehow popped into my head that helping businesses reach their best prospects and clients through mobile handhelds met all the criteria. After a few weeks of market research, I was convinced.
There is an even bigger motivation, which wasn’t obvious to me at the beginning. You see, the mobile internet isn’t just another shiny new technology. This shift to making the web truly mobile – which is happening right now, and will take several years to play out – is, in my opinion, going to prove historically significant. It is truly a new mass media, whose reach and power is likely to exceed radio, TV, perhaps even the desktop-oriented Internet.
I believe its emergence will go down in history books as one of humanity’s milestones, nearly up there with the emergence of the Internet itself. Who WOULDN’T want to be involved in that?
(And by the way, if you’re a web designer who wants to get paid to use Mobify to help build the mobile web, send a message to jobs@hilomath.com now 
Mobify: What kind of response do you get from your clients?
Aaron: Most clients so far are not-quite-small businesses, whose operators initially have not necessarily thought much about what their website looks like on phones. So, there is an education element in prospecting, which is why I’ve been doing things like giving talks to business groups. When first introducing the idea in person, it’s a joy to watch their eyes light up in their “oh, wow!” moment.
Once the job is done – the client has paid, and has received their mobile website – they’re generally thrilled. It’s been easy for us to collect testimonials from them, they are so happy with it.
Despite the “oh wow” reaction, it’s still a hard sell sometimes, because having a mobile-optimized web presence is still perceived as an optional expense. And sometimes it honestly is. Certain organizations will benefit from their mobile-optimized website much more than others (restaurants and cafes come to mind).
This will change in the coming years as mobile internet use grows. Just wait until it’s normal for a company’s web site to get over 50% of its traffic from handhelds. No one in their right mind will ignore that.
Mobify: What’s your favorite feature of Mobify? 
Aaron: This one’s a no brainer! It’s Mobify’s painless device detection and – related to that – content adaptation.
Unless they’ve hand-rolled a few mobile sites, I think most designers don’t appreciate the tremendous engineering challenge involved in having the web server quickly decide what kind of device the visitor is using, and dispatching appropriate content.
WURFL, the handheld device database, had almost 12,000 distinct device listings in September 2009. Doing the classification accurately, and without adding hundreds or thousands of milliseconds to response time, is hard enough. And then, new devices come out every week. Oh, and be careful what you do with search engine bots, or you’ll make a mess of your SEO!
There are free and paid libraries that make all this easier, but it’s great that Mobify just handles it all for you. Not all of our clients are appropriate for Mobify, but many are, and its conveniences allow us to price our services much lower in those cases.
Mobify: How do you see the web design process evolve over the next few years, with mobile devices and netbooks gaining market share?
Aaron: I think people will start to recognize that mobile-based web browsing is fundamentally different. Not because of the physical constraints of the devices – screen size, power, et cetera – though that is obviously a factor. The biggest difference is the context. When you’re out in the world, maybe with friends or traveling somewhere, your mindset and needs are different from when you are sitting at your office desk, or relaxing at home on the couch with a notebook in your lap.
As a result, we’re going to have to come up with information architecture patterns that simultaneously support desktop and mobile views. Do you serve the same content, including the same page structure, just with different CSS styling (which we’ve done with some clients)? Or do you have wholly different web sites for desktop and mobile (which we’ve also done)? A wealth of choices lie in between. And as has been repeated over and over in the web’s brief history, whenever great new technology shifts happen, it will become obvious what works best through collective experience over time.
By the way, about netbooks: people sometimes equate netbooks and handhelds. That makes no sense to me. Nearly all netbooks are much closer to a typical laptop than to a smartphone, in the ways that matter. Not just in physical size and interface. But more importantly, in how people use them.
Mobify: What’s an area where you think the mobile web has great potential?
Aaron: A big frontier is mobile marketing (MM). There are already people out there presenting themselves as MM experts, and many of them are truly offering advice and services of value. That said, I think there is tremendous untapped potential, and people are still figuring out how to take full advantage of it.
Consider email marketing, which has been practical and technologically simple for well over a decade. But only now are turnkey services like AWeber, Constant Contact, and Vertical Response becoming mainstream. Such applications are obvious in hindsight. Makes you wonder, what game-changing mobile web marketing opportunities are hiding in front of our noses right now?
Mobify: Any closing thoughts?
Aaron: Just thank you Mobify for being here, and making my life a lot easier!
And if any web designers are reading this and would like to be paid to use Mobify, send us a note at jobs@hilomath.com.
