Last Thursday, Stephen Powers, a WCM analyst with Forrester published a blog titled, “Splintering Into Mobile.” The blog highlights several problems facing marketers and website owners who are increasingly challenged to deliver content in formats appropriate for a growing array of mobile devices – this is the splintering.

Based on feedback from Forrester clients, Powers identified three main concerns associated with managing multiple online experiences:

1.      Number of devices. Most companies simply don’t have the resources to manage device-specific content and presentation for a multitude of devices.

2.      Production efficiencies. Managing mobile experiences alongside traditional websites is currently a major pain point for those who are trying to figure out the right mix of asset re-use and device-specific content while maintaining consistency.

3.      Globalization and localization. Some companies have expressed interest for tailoring content for a select number of devices that their customers use most often.

If you read the entire blog you’ll find a reference to other Forrester research on this topic and insights into the ways some CMS vendors are addressing these challenges. For now, I’ll cut to the chase and explain how Systems Alliance can help you manage multiple online experiences and deliver mobile-friendly Web content with SiteExecutive – and invite you to a webinar we’re hosting on this topic on April 28, 2011.

One of the important topics we’ll explore in the Webinar and mention here is the importance of administrative simplification. Managing and optimizing a website, even when you have a team of people dedicated to the task, is a lot of work. A Web content management system like SiteExecutive supports administrative simplification by letting you distribute responsibility for content creation, design, administration to people who are best suited for the task. For example, subject matter experts who may know nothing about HTML or CSS should be solely responsible for creating, managing and publishing what I’ll call “brand-aligned” Web content on your Website.

Brand-aligned content meets your organization’s quality, compliance and format guidelines. And, it also meets the needs of your site visitors – thus, it should be compelling and accessible by all visitors, including the disabled and people visiting your site on mobile devices…

Taking this a step further, your CMS should also play a role in managing multiple (mobile) online experiences. With SiteExecutive, content authors create content once and the software automatically determines how that content should render (display) based on the visitor’s browser profile. SiteExecutive accomplishes this by detecting the visitor’s browser type and swapping the template and associated CSS for the content so it displays properly on the mobile device. This functionality also works with video content, swapping HTML5 compatible content for Flash video when serving iPhones and other related devices.

Executing the template swapping process requires development of mobile-friendly templates and related CSS. For many sites this can be accomplished in a matter of hours. The success of this approach is dependent on the structure of your site’s content. It also works best for sites where the over-arching desire is to make the whole site mobile friendly. And, this is the crux of our approach.

You need a full-blown mobile site – now!

While you may need an iPhone, Android or Blackberry “app” to deliver some specific functionality for your customers/visitors, ultimately, what you really need – and this will become increasingly true as mobile devices proliferate – is a full-blown mobile site, because any and all of your content is fair game for mobile visitors. And, you shouldn’t have to think about splintering your content OR content creation process to make this happen!