Common Mobile Web Mistakes (and How to Avoid Them)
The mobile web mistakes businesses kept making in 2007, from clunky WAP sites to ignoring how the iPhone's Safari browser changed expectations overnight.
The iPhone shipped on June 29, 2007, and its mobile Safari browser did something most phones before it hadn’t: it rendered full desktop websites, zoomable and scrollable, instead of forcing everyone onto stripped-down WAP pages. That single change exposed how badly most business websites handled mobile visitors, and it happened fast enough that a lot of companies got caught flat-footed. Here are the mistakes that kept showing up.
Treating “mobile” as a separate, stripped-down site nobody asked for. For years the standard approach was a bare-bones WAP site (small text, no images, a handful of links) built for old feature phones. That made sense when phones like the Nokia and Motorola flip models couldn’t render much else. But by mid-2007, with the iPhone rendering real web pages and other manufacturers racing to add proper browsers, a business whose “mobile site” was a gutted, years-old WAP page looked worse than having no mobile site at all.
Never testing on an actual device. It’s easy to check a site in a desktop browser window resized to a small width and assume that’s what a phone sees. It isn’t. Actual mobile browsers in 2007, Safari on the iPhone, Opera Mini on countless other handsets, Windows Mobile’s Internet Explorer, all rendered pages differently, and page weight mattered enormously over a cellular connection. A site that loaded fine at a desk on broadband could take thirty seconds or fail entirely over EDGE, the network the first iPhone shipped with.
Ignoring page weight and load time. Heavy Flash navigation, oversized images and bloated ad scripts were common on business sites in 2007, and all of them punished mobile visitors far more than desktop ones. The fix wasn’t complicated: compress images, cut unnecessary scripts and check what the homepage weighs before publishing it.
No plan for phone numbers and directions. A huge share of mobile searches in 2007 were people looking for a business’s phone number, hours or address while already out and about, often standing near a payphone alternative that happened to fit in their pocket. Sites that buried this information behind several clicks, or presented it as an image instead of selectable text, made the most common mobile use case needlessly hard.
Assuming mobile was a fad worth waiting out. Some businesses reasoned that mobile browsing was a novelty for early adopters and that a proper fix could wait until next year’s budget cycle. That bet aged badly. Once a widely used phone could render real websites well, customer expectations moved quickly, and competitors who adapted first captured the attention of mobile users while everyone else was still debating whether it mattered.
Chasing native apps before the basics existed. It’s worth noting that in mid-2007 there was no App Store and no way to distribute a true native application to the iPhone; Apple’s original guidance to developers was to build web apps using standard web technologies. That made getting the mobile web experience right, not chasing some future app, the actual priority for any business trying to reach phone users that year.
The businesses that avoided these mistakes weren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest development budgets. They were the ones willing to open their own site on an actual phone, notice how painful it was and fix the worst offenders first: page weight, contact information and basic readability.
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