This is the third installment of the Mobile Marketing Starter Kit Series that I kicked off in July. All of these posts are filed under Starter Kit if you need to get caught up. The goal is to continue adding helpful resources for professionals in the mobile marketing community. There is no set order, if I write about a new topic I’ll generally issue it a new Chapter number. However, I may go back and install additional posts within a previous chapter or allow a guest writer to do that same.

So if you’re in the mobile marketing space and want to get some exposure on a topic for this series contact me. I will let you talk about your company (are you listening mobile marketing geeks) in these posts provided that the majority of your post is contributing to the Starter Kit theme for the mobile marketing community.

The theme for this installment is obviously testing. Testing is really important for mobile marketing folks; it’s absolutely critical that you test your campaigns and content to see how they’re received on various devices prior to launch or your campaign will never get off the ground. What you don’t want to do is launch and then discover 35% of your audience is using a device that is not capable of rendering your content. The root cause of this type of failure is going to be lack of testing and that will really reflect poorly.

So with that said here’s a web site that can help you test your mobile web site, free.

dotMobi has a fairly exhaustive emulator that will run your mobile web site through 35 tests to determine how it will appear on a mobile handheld device. I recently installed a wordpress mobile edition plugin for my blog so I thought I’d use it as my test for this post.

Here’s how the emulator impersonates my site on a Nokia N70. Oh and you have the ability to cycle your mobile site through several other types of emulators too which didn’t get any better for me.

My blog is average at best according to their test emulator… yikes. So, if I were planning on launching a mobile awareness campaign to promote my blog I’d delay until I addressed the issues that have been identified.

Overall, the test summary indicates 21 passes so perhaps I’m slightly better than average in my mind but there are 4 failures and so it’s a good idea to understand what those are.

An area my site didn’t fare so well in was Compliance Testing… whoops, maybe I am just average, these are important.

The valid markup is something that I might be able to address, in my particular instance I’m running wordpress and so I’m not really interested in monkyeing around with the markup. However, in a campaign setting I’d have to address this issue or my content might not appear as I had originally intended.

XHTML Mobile Profile (XHTML MP) is a content type declaration that appears to be missing in the mobile version of my blog. I might be able to address this by reviewing the suggested XHTML MP Doctypes that dotMobi has made and plugging that into my system. However, in my case I’m using a wordpress plugin so I’ll alert the developer of the plugin and see if he can implement the upgrade not just for me but all of the folks that are using this plugin.

Here are the suggested XHTML MP Doctype declarations that dotMobi has made for me.

If you’d like more information on XHTML MP, Wikipedia has a nice reference on the topic and the evolution of mobile web standards.

There are few unique features in the dotMobi test system that I’ve not seen anywhere else, two of which are illustrated in this scorecard I received on my blog. The first two scores across the top show my stinky score and overall file size which appears to be lightweight (good thing). Look closely at the two features across the bottom though. These are unique. Estimated cost by Country and estimated speed by network technology.

This is spectacular information; I wish it could be expanded to include other Countries. Marketers would be thrilled to know what the cost of receipt estimates look like while testing campaign variations. Who knew campaign optimization would include something like lowering the cost for the end user! This is another reason why mobile marketing is different, end users have data plans of one type or another… they’re paying to look at your stuff, so why not take advantage of a tool that can help you make optimizations in this area.

Look at the level of detail that is implemented, this is impressive; here are the checks that my blog was measured against. I do have a Google sitemap and I believe my plugin assigned it a nutty file extension like sitemap.xml.gz and so I’ll bet it’s not finding that.

Green=pass; Red=fail; Silver=comment; Orange=warning.

In the event of a failure or warning in any particular area a hyperlink’d shortcut is offered to help you individually address these issues. The shortcut takes you off to a new window to prevent leaving your test.

To sum it up here are the 35 tests that the dotMobi emulator will execute against your mobile site.

• Multiple device selection
• File size check
• Estimated cost
• Estimated speed
• Mime types
• Character encoding
• Pop up windows
• Alt Text
• Image maps
• Specify images sizes
• Measures
• Page title
• Use of stylesheets
• Stylesheet dependency
• Objects or scripts
• Auto refresh
• Redirection
• Default Input Mode
• Provide defaults
• Page size limit
• Large graphics
• Tables
• Nested tables
• Tables for layout
• Access Keys
• Caching
• External resources
• Avoid free text
• Structure
• Google sitemap
• Form submit buttons
• XHTML mobile profile
• Valid markup
• Second level domain
• No frames

You can test your mobile web site at dotMobi. Leave a comment if you have some other really useful mobile website testing tools that you use.

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