Mobilizer - optimise your site for mobile

The Mobilizer tool from Ubik.com is a tool for building mobile sites. It has two main use cases: you build a mobile site from one of its templates or you give it the address of your current desktop site, and it crawls and "mobilizes" all the pages it finds. There are three steps in the Mobilizer process to convert an existing desktop site: Importing, Editing, and Publishing.

Step 1 - Import your site

New users sign up with a standard sign-up form and confirmation email. On activating an account, users are presented with a choice to convert an existing desktop site, or to create a new mobile site using a template based system. In either case, the mobile site will be hosted at example.ubik.com, where example is a subdomain of your choice. The system uses a wizard-like interface.

To convert an existing desktop site, users need simply supply the URL of the site, and specify how deep into the site to visit. Mobilizer then crawls the site, converting each page it finds to a vertical flowing mobile-optimised page. On completion (there appears to be limit of 100 pages per site), the user is presented with a 'Review' page where the pages converted can be reviewed.

Step 2 - Review your site

There are quite a few noteworthy features at this point, and it's worth spending a little time to look at each. The first thing to note is that Mobilizer's preview page allows you to choose 4 grades of device on which to preview your mobilized content. These grades are Basic, Low, High, and Best. Details of these grades of device are outlined in the table below:

	Basic	Low	High	Best
Screen Res	65x45	128x128	240x320	240x320
Colours	Basic	Low	High	High
Widgets	Not supported	Not supported	Not supported	Fully supported
Example	Nokia 335	Nokia 6230	Blackberry-7100i	SE P910

Not only is this a powerful feature at the site-building stage, it is even more significant that Mobilizer will be delivering adapted content depending on the device that visits the final mobilized site. Initially, Mobilizer stores a device independent version of the site (XDIME) which is dynamically transcoded to each device profile. However, the user can later define if certain pages contain dynamic content. In this case, Mobilizer will transcode the page(s) on the fly. Of course how useful this adaptation is depends on the complexity of the initial site in the first case.

Another feature, and not immediately apparent, is that the resulting mobilized site is paginated where appropriate. For low-end devices, long pages are broken up over a number of smaller, manageable pages, with navigation links between the pages generated automatically. This ensures that low-end device browsers will not crash from being overloaded with content.

The next noteworthy feature of the preview page is the 'Editor'. On clicking into the preview, the application gives a view of the PC version of the page on the left-side, and displays an emulation of the mobilized version on the right hand side (see image). If you are not happy with the way your mobilized page looks, then you can click into the 'Editor' tab, and a smooth AJAX-based drag-and-drop building-block interface allows you to drag web components onto a WYSIWYG editor. Widgets that can be added include Text areas, Navigation components, Images, a Search component, an Image Gallery widget, Adverts, and Maps.

Finally, there is a useful sitemap representation of the site that has been built/mobilized. This representation serves two purposes: to illustrate the structure of the site, and also to provide a mechanism by which pages can be chosen to edit (see image). Each node in the sitemap graph has controls for deleting, editing, and previewing, as well as information about the page including page size, number of links, and number of images. Another neat feature is that a node can be clicked to show or hide child nodes at the next site level.

At this point pages can be marked as static or dynamic. If it is marked as static, then Mobilizer downloads it and saves a copy. If a page is marked as dynamic, say a blog page that changes often, then Mobilizer does not download and save a copy, and it won't let you edit it. Instead, a dynamic page will be downloaded and transcoded directly from its source whenever a new request is made for this page.

 

All in all, this is a pretty feature-rich preview and editing tool. To build a mobile site from scratch the same editor/previewer is available to use. For each page users can choose from a number of templates.



When all editing has been completed, having been mobilized, or created from scratch, then the user has the option to publish the site.

Step 3 - Publish your site

Publishing is simple - clicking the Publish link brings the user to a page which displays details about how the site will be published. These details include the URL that the site will be available at. The URL of the mobilized site is on a sub-domain of ubik.com e.g. dotMobi.ubik.com. For a static site it might be desirable to export to a host server of one's choice. However, we understand that Ubik will be deploying a feature to allow mobilized sites to be on third party domains. Another possible drawback of hosting the mobilized site at Ubik, is that the desktop and mobile sites will now be hosted in different locations, and basic device detection will be required on the original site to route mobile users to the new mobilized site.

The biggest advantage is that having Ubik host the site means that the user can use the dynamic content adaptation feature. This feature dynamically transcodes the mobilized site into a number of markup languages to support over 4,000 devices.

The Publish page offers a useful simple authentication procedure too, to ensure that you are the owner of the site that you have mobilized. This process involves adding a meta-tag to the markup of the home-page of your original site. The mobilized site will not be published unless this tag is detected in the original site.

There is also an option to generate a sitemap file containing information of the structure of your site, and which can be used to register your site with search engines.

Mobilizer in action

To put Mobilizer to the test, we decided to run it on http://mobiforge.com . Mobilizer went about its task crawling the desktop version of mobiForge, and mobilizing each page it found efficiently. The mobilized site scored only 2 on ready.mobi. However, when we examine what is really happening, it becomes clear that things are not that bad after all. The main reason for the low score was large page-size. However ready.mobi does not currently take device adaptation into account when it factors page size into the final score. In fact Mobilizer performs a lookup on the maximum page size that the accessing device can support. Mobilizer optimises page-size for a specific device, so that low-end devices will be delivered smaller pages, resulting in a good mobile user experience. Ready.mobi did not take this into account, and so its score did not accurately reflect the usability of the Mobilized version of the site.

It should also be noted that we did not use any of the advanced options to guide the conversion process, and we already had a tailored mobile version of the site to compare the results with. When we put the two mobile sites side by side it was obvious that certain page components which were dispensed with in the tailored version (as they were not so relevant to the mobile context), were included in the Mobilized version. This highlights that converting a site for mobile is a non-trivial process, and that for complex sites, it is not always possible to automatically decide which parts of a site should be displayed in the mobile context, and which should not.

 

Conclusion

Ubik's Mobilizer is a very useful tool for anyone looking for a quick start to join the mobile revolution by converting their existing site. Where users are unhappy with how a page looks after conversion, there is always the option to tweak it manually with a feature-rich editor. Mobilizer also delivers device-adaptation, and live transcoding of dynamic pages, which would be useful for converting a desktop blog site for instance. Care is needed however when converting complex sites, and site owners should make use of the review and editing tools to refine the conversion process. Overall the Mobilizer is a very useful and easy-to-use tool.