Tip: Design Websites for Mobile…First

A few months ago, I was visiting a local news website on my mobile phone and noticed how simple and easy it was to access the article I was trying to read. They had designed a mobile version of their website that was surprising easy to navigate and gave me just the information I needed and wanted. I say “surprisingly” because their normal website was the opposite. It is overrun with ads and has WAY TOO MUCH content.

It struck me after visiting their mobile site that we should all design our websites for mobile devices…but do it first! The constraints would force us to ask several hard questions during the design/creative process:

• What is the most important information that a visitor to this site needs/wants to know?
• How can I communicate information effectively with the fewest words?
• How can I make navigating our site (in all directions) elegant?
• What is the least amount of information that I have to require our users to give us and still make their experience valuable?

It’s a matter of making things easy, simple, and understandable for the end user.  Even if you do not have any plans to launch a mobile version of your website (though I think that you should), I think this process will help make your websites more effective.

What are some of the best sites you’ve seen designed for mobile devices? Or what sites do you wish were designed for mobile?

Tags: mobile

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Once upon a time, The Bible was printed on paper

The title of this post doesn’t quite reflect where we are today, but I can see the day coming where the Bible printed on paper seems as ancient as writing it on a scroll.

A while back I wrote that the future is mobile. The greatest book in history appears to be proving that. The Bible made its debut on the iPhone almost two weeks ago. In just the first 12 days, we have seen over 130,000 people install the Bible App on their iPhone or iPod Touch. What has been amazing to us is that iPhone users have spent more than 6.2 million minutes reading the Bible in just the last two weeks!

Earlier this week we submitted the first update to the iPhone application to Apple.  We hope that they will be releasing it soon on iTunes, but because of the backlog of applications it may take several days. This update includes several bug fixes, a few new features and design changes, and 4 additional translations (HCSB, Elberfelder Bibel (German), Louis Segond (French), and Chinese Union Version Simplified).

We are currently working on making several translations available for use when your iPhone or iPod is offline as well as more integration into the additional features of YouVersion.com

As a reminder to those of you who do not have iPhones. You can access many of the same features as you can on the iPhone on any phone with Internet access by using YouVersion.com Moble. Just go to http://m.youversion.com/ from any web enabled phone.

Additionally, there was a new update on YouVersion.com last week that included several new things. You can read more about those on the YouVersion Blog.

Thank you to all of you who downloaded the Bible App, shared it with your friends, posted about it on your blog, and wrote reviews on iTunes. All of that helped engage more people with Scripture…and that’s a great thing!

UPDATE:  Version 1.1 has been released and can now be downloaded from iTunes

Tags: iPhone, mobile, mobile bible

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Free Mobile Bible

I mentioned in a previous post that the future is mobile…

Now, you can now access the Bible via your mobile phone at http://m.youversion.com! If you have a web enabled mobile phone, you will be able to read and search The Bible in 14+ translations and much more. Here are some example screen shots on mobile phones (click to enlarge):

Some of the key features include:

• Quick Search including Book, Verse, Keywords/Text.
• 14+ translations currently including: ASV, AMP, ESV, HCSB, NASB, NCV, NIV, NKJV, TNIV, MSG, WEB, LBLA (Spanish), NBLH (Spanish), RVA (Spanish).
• Daily Reading (One Year Bible).
• YouVersion.com User contributions attributed to scripture verses including text, links and YouTube mobile video.
• List of the 20 most recent user contributions.

Oh, I almost forgot…of course it works on the iPhone

Be sure to check it out using your mobile phone at http://m.youversion.com. Terry Storch, Brad, Andy and the rest of Team Digerati would love to hear any feedback you might have. I think they’ve done a great job with it!

Pastors/church leaders, this a great tool to promote to your church and through your blogs as it is a simple, free and very accessible way to get people engaged with Scripture!

Now, let’s help our Swerve readers and others who might find this post when looking for a mobile Bible by helping them find some great Scriptures.

What is one of your favorite verses in the Bible? One of mine is Galatians 2:20 (We’ll link them all up to YouVersion.com after you comment so people can dive right in)

Tags: Bible, mobile, mobile bible, YouVersion

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