Engage Brain Open Mind: Create a Mobile-Friendly Website for Your Business with moBistro

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Create a Mobile-Friendly Website for Your Business with moBistro

Create a Mobile-Friendly Website for Your Business with moBistro

via Mashable! by Christina Warren on 5/24/10

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Name: moBistro
Quick Pitch: Create your own mobile websites that are compatible on 98% of all smartphones with a simple user backend.
Genius Idea: moBistro is a service that makes it easy for business owners to create mobile versions of their websites without having to do any coding on their own. Many of the features are aimed at restaurant owners, who often have Flash-based websites that break on most mobile phones.

While other sites like MoFuse also offer mobile website creation, moBistro is unique in its restaurant-focused options. Users can easily add in location data, links to external sites like OpenTable, events that can become accessible in a calendar, menus, special offers and more.
Everything on your moBistro site is manageable through a control panel that was designed to be easy to use and operate. When it comes time to serve the website, moBistro will automatically redirect mobile phones to the correct version of the site, depending on what capabilities the phone has.
You can customize moBistro to fit with your business’s branding and color scheme and you can monitor mobile web traffic from Google Analytics.
moBistro doesn’t just create the mobile-friendly version of your website; it hosts it too. That’s good for users who don’t want to have to deal with configuring their web server to serve the mobile version of their sites, however, it does make the product more expensive.
While we think the services offered by moBistro are great, we think the pricing — which starts at $19.99 per month — is a bit high for this kind of service. Still, the ability to easily create mobile-friendly content that can work on hundreds of devices without having to do any coding is an idea that should appeal to lots of business owners who are trying to figure out how to best address the mobile web.

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest – use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: Google Analytics, PHP

Tags: mobile web, mobistro, Web Development