The breadth and diversity of the mobile web

For a mass medium to really get traction and achieve critical mass it is important that creating content is as easy as consuming it—the growth of the medium tracks the availability of the content creation tools. In the early days of the web hackers used home-grown web servers to serve content and a copy of Vi to author it. It wasn’t long before Apache and other web servers eased the job of serving the content but the creation of good web content remained the preserve of experts.

Web authoring applications like Dreamweaver and Frontpage brought the job of web authoring squarely into the realm of non-experts and the result was an explosion of web content. But we’ve moved on even further since then. Now we have tools like WordPress, Drupal, Typepad and other CMSes that have commoditized content creation and brought to where it belongs—to the browser. Anyone with a web browser can now create web content cheaply and easily—there are almost no barriers. The result was another spurt of growth, with over a trillion unique web pages according to Google.

The mobile web by contrast is only beginning to catch up with its promise. The problem is that mobile web content creation has, until recently, been a dark art, a form of Ju-Ju magic performed only by experts. Thanks to the evolution of better tools this is beginning to change, however.

Here are a few small business mobile web sites, built by normal people—the small businesses themselves, in a browser. It’s interesting to note that in some of these cases, these are the only sites used by the business. Note too the wide range of countries reflected. These sites were all built with goMobi, dotMobi’s web-based solution that lets you create a mobile site in about 10 minutes.