Small Businesses Turn To DotMobi For Mobile Web Sites

Interest in the mobile Web is high among many small and medium-sized businesses, but most of these small companies see launching a mobile site as too challenging. That's why they're turning to dotMobi as a simple and less expensive alternative.A report in The Wall Street Journal looks at a number of SMBs using DotMobi-based Web sites, including a bed-and-breakfast in South Carolina.

The Mobile Top Level Domain, the company in charge of dotMobi, estimates that 17% of the 475,000 dotMobi addresses use their mobile sites to offer live content. MTLD has also issued guidelines for building .mobi Web sites and plans to charge content developers around $250 to $300 to certify them as approved .mobi developers. The company's initiatives also include a site with how-to tips on how to optimize for the mobile Web.

The dotMobi movement has met with criticism, especially from the World Wide Web Consortium and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, noted inventor of the Web. The W3C is instead pushing for a world where a single domain (like .com) is optimized for access across a number of devices, including notebooks, PCs, and mobile phones.