In fact, it's predicted that by 2015 mobile internet usage will surpass traditional desktop-based browsing. It's easy to understand why having a mobile-friendly website is quickly transitioning from a "want" to a "need" for most business and organizations, non-profits included.

What does it mean to have a mobile-friendly website?

You may be thinking to yourself, "Sure, those are some impressive stats, but my iPhone or Android device is perfectly capable of displaying full desktop sites in all their glory... so why should I care about a separate mobile site?"

Actually, you're absolutely correct. Today's smartphones have more than enough horsepower to render slideshow, animations, graphics, and videos just as you'd see them on your desktop or laptop web browser.

Unfortunately, it's no longer enough for a site to just work on a user's device - for maximum impact it needs to be specifically optimized for display on that device. It goes without saying that pinching, zooming, and panning around every page of a site creates a less-than-ideal experience for the visitor. A mobile-optimized website aims to remedy this common problem by intelligently organizing your most important content in a way that's easier to consume on a phone or tablet.

I don't think my website is mobile-optimized, what do I do about it?

If you use a website platform like those provided by CaveIM, your mobile website is already included for free. If not, there are a variety of ways to enhance mobile compatibility, but the best course of action for each site has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Your web developer or hosting company should be familiar with the various options and can provide more detail on how to move forward with improving the mobile experience. If you don't have a trusted provider, feel free to get in touch with us for more information.

Make mobile compatibility a priority today.

Every day that passes without a mobile site is a day that you risk alienating your visitors. In this fast-paced world of short attention spans and on-the-go browsing, it's vital that your website conveys its most important information in an easy-to-understand, mobile-friendly format.

1. The humidity is really low (and leading to nose bleeds, cracked/dry/itchy skin, temperature irregularities throughout the house, etc). After struggling with small humidifiers we settled on the idea of getting a centrally-installed, whole-house humidifier put in.
2. Our basement sewage system seemed like it needed cleaned out. Toilets flushed slowly, and the drain in the utility room began to get standing water in it (that rose and fell as we used any of the basement facilities).

Getting started

After putting these tasks off for a couple of months we finally decided it was time to get them checked off the list. So, a few weeks ago, I began the saga of finding decently-priced, reputable businesses to handle the work.

I wanted to tackle the sewer first, since that had the potential to be a big mess if the situation got much worse. Working off of a recommendation, I called the first plumber. A guy answered, took my info, and said he'd have someone call me back to discuss an estimate over the phone.

Never heard back from him.

While I was waiting for his call back, I did get one or two ballpark estimates over the phone from other local businesses. A couple of others wanted to come out to estimate the job, and I set up appointments for the following Wednesday.

Snowpocalypse 2011

As luck would have it, a blizzard settled in over Springfield on Tuesday, one day before the appointments. We got so much snow that the mall and many other businesses closed early that night and didn't open on time (or at all) on Wednesday. It was obvious our appointments would be cancelled, and I waited by the phone to get the call.

Only it never came. No word from either place. Didn't hear anything on Thursday, and by Friday we had decided that it didn't really matter if they did call, we weren't going to have someone with so little respect for their customers doing any work for us.

Moving on

On Monday, Melissa set up an appointment with one last place to see if we could get someone to look at it in person. Since we already had a few ballpark estimates over the phone we knew that the price should be about $150-200 to clean out the main sewer drain. We just wanted at least one plumber to actually see it in person and tell us for sure what the problem was.

Well, Friday morning rolls around, and 9am (the appointment time) comes and goes. Finally, at 10:45am, a rep from the company calls and says they've got a technician ready to come to our house. As we were running out of local plumbers, I reluctantly told her to go ahead and send him. She said he'd be there in 30 minutes. 

At 11:45am (1 hour later), the company vehicle finally rolled into our driveway. A tall, long haired man resembling Big Kenny greeted me at the front door. He was quite knowledgeable about his trade (as he should be, but judging by my experiences so far I have to say I wasn't expecting it) and immediately pinpointed what he thought the problem was: the sewage pump. He spent the next half hour running tests to prove his theory, and settled on this: the pump wasn't completely shot, but the float was sticking and the pump wasn't turning on as it should be, which resulted in the backup in the drain. It's no emergency, but probably needs to be replaced in the near future.

Now I had a new problem: I had several estimates, but only one for replacing the sewage pump. Also, although "Big Kenny" was pretty awesome, I wasn't thrilled with the service the company itself had provided. I had no doubts that he would be able to come back out and successfully complete the job, but I went ahead and called one last plumber to see if I could get them to take a look at it and give me their opinion on what was wrong.

My experience with this final company stood in stark contrast to the rest of this saga: they immediately diagnosed the problem over the phone (again, arriving at the conclusion of a bad sewage pump), gave me an estimate, and said they'd be out within the hour. A half-hour later they were here, verified the problem, and replaced the pump. Total time: less than and hour and a half from when I called them to when they finished the job and pulled out of my driveway.

The lesson

Being a small, freelance business, I completely understand the challenges that come with managing requests and responding to clients. But being on the client end of the relationship really opened my eyes to how important a simple phone call or e-mail can be. I would've gladly rescheduled any of the appointments to better accommodate any of the businesses' schedules, had they simply called me back. In the end, it was their loss. What they thought would be a simple $150 job ended up being a $600 pump replacement.

If you're from the Springfield area you might be wondering who the plumbers in this story were. It's not my intention to publicly condemn anyone for poor business practices, but I will tell you that Illini Septic & Sewer was the business we chose in the end.

Does this practice help retain some of the customers who might have otherwise continued to leave? Probably. But it turns me off, not only to that particular service but to the entire company. It immediately plants a seed in my mind that says “If they can offer this price to me now, now that I want to quit using their product, then really they’ve just been screwing me the entire time.”

It also reinforces this mentality that people have today that makes all of society think that if they just argue a bit more, they’ll get what they want. This “well maybe if I threaten to leave they’ll give me a better deal” mentality goes hand-in-hand with the “give it to me now” attitude that seems to be so prevalent today and creates a monster of a customer who is consistently nothing but a pain in the ass to deal with.

The whole idea is complete rubbish. As the noble, upstanding businesses that we all claim to be, we should be offering the best price to our current customers, especially to ones that have been with us for years. If you’ve already lost someone to the point that they’re canceling, giving the service to them is going to do nothing but prolong the inevitable and you’ll waste precious resources trying to please a customer who’s still going to leave you in the long run.

historious is quite possibly the coolest little bookmarking service I’ve ever seen. It gives you a bookmarklet that you can use to flag interesting sites and articles as you’re browsing the web. Then when you have a need to find information on a topic you’re pretty sure you’ve researched (and ‘historified’) before, you can just hop over to your historify search and easily rediscover everything you’ve previously run across on that topic. It basically creates your own personalized Google Search.

This service fits into my natural workflow much better than Delicioius or Pinboard ever could because I don’t have to tag anything. Historious crawls the site for me and pulls out the relevant keywords.

I regularly zip over to Google and search for something before I ever think of opening my bookmarks just because the search is so much faster and more accurate. Browsing my bookmarks has become somewhat of a secondary task for me, taken up only after I’ve spent 10 minutes trying to find the information in Google. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it’s the way I’ve grown accustom to working.

Now with historious, I get the best of both worlds.

I came a cross a link to the Forrst App Competition (http://forrstappcontest.com) via the ThinkVitamin blog and decided to check it out.

As the page started loading (which, when fully rendered, consists of dark text inside a lighter-colored content area, all laid on top of a dark page background) it quickly became apparent that no one had ever tested this site on a slow connection. The text loaded fine, then almost as quickly the dark page background loaded. The image used for the lighter content area, however, had not.

This left me with, for all intensive purposes, fully loaded content. I couldn’t access any of said content though because the dark text was laying directly on top of the dark background, making it difficult (if not impossible) to read. I had to wait minutes for my slow connection to pull down the background image before I could read the content.

For me this was a minor inconvenience, but don’t forget that some people have this slow of access all the time. They still have thoughts they want to share and money to spend on your products, so don’t ‘leave them in the dark.’

Now I can’t wait to get home and make sure this problem doesn’t exist with any sites we’re currently running.

minimalmac:

The other day, I wanted to find out the web safe color of a particular item on the screen of my Mac for a web design project I was working on. My first step was to go searching the Internet for such a tool (preferably free). Then, in the midst of said search, I was reminded that this little tool was not only already on my Mac, did exactly what I wanted, but also did it better than any of the tools I was able to find.

So I’ve been toying around with Pandora and Last.fm the last couple of days, trying to decide which service fits my needs better. Here’s a quick rundown of my observations:

Pandora

• Pro: The service itself is reliable
• Pro: iPhone app is brilliantly simple
• Con: Website is hideous
• Con: Have to pay (only $36/yr though) for a desktop app, which still isn’t native to OSX - it’s an AIR app.

Last.fm

• Pro: Has a native desktop app
• Pro: Scrobbling allows me to use my recent iTunes listens to influence recommendations from the service
• Con: Service seems buggy and unstable at times
• Con: iPhone app isn’t as intuitive
• Con: iPhone app doesn’t currently support iOS4 background multitasking (although it probably will in the near future)
• Con (for me anyway): I don’t care about the “social” aspect of streaming audio. It’s all just superfluous fluff as far as I’m concerned.

My main use for the streaming audio is going to be on my iPhone, so that gives Pandora major brownie points. In fact, my only real problem with Pandora is the lack of a decent desktop-listening experience. As I said, you can’t use the desktop app without signing up for Pandora One and even then you still don’t get a very attractive UI.

For now I’ve settled on Pandora, but I’m not quite ready to sign up for Pandora One yet. In the mean time I’ve used Safari’s “webclip” feature to run the web version of the Pandora interface straight from my dashboard. Now to listen to and interact with Pandora all I have to do is hit my Dashboard button!

Note: When creating your web clip, make sure and click the little “i” button in the widget to flip it over and uncheck “Only play audio in Dashboard” so that you can continue to listen to your stations even when you’re not on the Dashboard.

1. Open Terminal
2. Copy and paste, then press ‘Return’ to add a spacer (repeat this step to insert as many spacers as you like):

   defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{"tile-type"="spacer-tile";}'

3. Now restart the dock by typing:

   killall Dock

Now you’ll see a spacer between your icons. This spacer can be dragged around just like any other application icon, including out of the dock to make it disappear when you’re done with it.

If only 1Password worked properly in it…

Twitter acquires Tweetie iPhone app, renaming it 'Twitter for iPhone'

It’s that easy!

The lesson is: if I want to read your blog, I’ll subscribe to the RSS feed. I didn’t follow you on Twitter so I could see all your blog posts in my stream. Rather, I was hoping maybe you’d talk about and link to other interesting content/information. Once you start importing all blog posts and junking up my Twitter, I don’t really care to follow you anymore, even if you are posting other interesting stuff in between.

With nearly everyone in our family owning an iPhone, we immediately all but stopped using AT&T’s over-priced text messaging and quickly became fans of the service.

This week we had an impromptu iPhone party around the dinner table to introduce Ping!’s successor: WhatsApp.

WhatsApp brings an updated version of the same strategy that made Ping! famous: Offering free messaging between iPhone users via push notifications. WhatsApp ups the ante with several awesome features:

• Slick, visually pleasing interface
• Send media including photos, videos, voice messages, a map of your location, or contact info for anyone in your address book
• Your phone number acts as your device identifier. No more trying to remember your friends’ usernames.
• Automatic importing of friends in your address book who are using WhatsApp
• More configuration options
• Visual notification (via small checkmarks) when your message has been successfully sent AND when the recipient has opened WhatsApp and received the message.
• Multiple platform support (iPhone, Blackberry, and soon Android)

And perhaps my favorite feature of all - it sends messages 2 to 3 times faster than Ping! ever could. At $0.99, WhatsApp is a welcome addition to my iPhone dock. Goodbye, Ping!, it was fun while it lasted :)