Russell Beattie looks ahead to a coming future when more people access the Web from their web pages than from their PCs, and the impact this will have on web page design. [To an extent this is already happening in countries like Japan, and I have a feeling this will happen soon in India, too.]
Imagine someday soon where your PC browser is secondary. It’ll all be XHTML, but the primary focus and use of the website will be the phone. Isn’t this how things are in Japan right now where iMode is so insanely popular? It seems an obvious thing – websites focused only on mobile browsing.
Mobile Web Pages will be the norm when you can create a complete mobile website from your phone without help from a computer. It’s like the web equivalent of a OS bootstrapping. Until you can do everything from creation to consuming from your mobile, there’ll always be a PC in the way, and thus the mindset won’t change (at least for me).
Creating and consuming via mobiles… but I’m suddenly realizing that it’s more than just for media or photos, it’s really an alternate web that’s going to be developed, one focused on mobile devices where PC access is definitely secondary.
Most webloggers already sees their web server as an extension of their identity. It holds all the public data associated with that person, thoughts, pictures, resumes, and more. I think we’re going to see that even more with mobile phones.
I wonder when the first mobile phones will be launched with server space already allocated? There’s no reason that can’t be happening now with SyncML, etc. If I were a carrier in this portable number world we now live in, I would make phones just an extension of an online data repository, and make it as seamless as possible for that person to create data and store it online, some for public consumption and other for private data. When someone gets their phone, they should first be thinking “Ooh, I better set up the web page that goes along with this…”
