The ENTER2009 conference comes to a close today, and is slowly ramping down. The highlights of today’s talks include tips for designing an effective web presence, and information about how the mobile sector will soon becoming quite important.

Iselin Skogland from ethotelservices started her talk by stating that websites aren’t beauty contests. They are functionality and usability one. She served up several tips, that are relevant for most websites: No flash (Google can’t index it), tag everything (Google likes tags), have a good linking strategy and target niche keywords. As you may have noticed most of those tips are related to search engine optimization. Here are some quick pros and cons for good web presences:

Pros:
Low to no start up cost
Free day-to-day basis
Increased visibility
Free “training” online, maybe you can do it yourself
Small targeted budgets- you can leave whenever you want

Cons:
Does require some skill
Concerted effort, you need to know what you want to do (so you know when you’ve done it)
Takes a long term effort
Time consuming
Ever-changing area

Stephen Williams of the Fitzgerald Group had some more design-oriented tips:

Simple is better
Keep download times low
Easy to find things = easy to buy things
Consistency in your media usage
Test on all browsers!
Know the purpose of your online effort
Have a site map (for Google)
Don’t just put your brochure online! Do something more

As mentioned the third talk concerned itself with how mobile is on the rise. Peter Valow from Team Tourism explained how mobile web-usage is rising steadily.  It is projectet that mobile will be the standard way of connecting to the web by 2020 (maybe even before). It is not the same as WWW, because it uses a person’s personal space far more than a PC. There are currently 1 billion internet subscriptions in the world. There are 4 billion mobile ones. Trends in the mobile area:

1. Convergence of devices and services
2. Locations based services on the rise – 90 % of phones expected to have GPS by 2014
3. Social networking on the go is rising
4. More mobile data traffic originates from home! 60 % by 2013
5. Mobile commerce (m-commerce), paying via your phone is emerging

That was all from ENTER2009, and I will be heading back north soon. As always, if you’ve become interested in any of the ideas, concepts or technologies mentioned here please don’t hesitate to email myself or others here at Seismonaut.