November 13, 2012
By Judith Aquino,

Telnames Rolls Out Mobile Site Building App

While nearly every company now has a Web site, many organizations, particularly small and midsized businesses, are hesitating before jumping onto the mobile bandwagon as well. There are several components that businesses need to consider when developing their mobile strategies: Apps, Web sites, and SMS form the broad foundation. Mobile payments and advertising must also be considered.

For small businesses that lack the time and the resources to experiment with a mobile site, Telnames, a United Kingdom-based company that helps customers build mobile-optimized Web sites, today rolled out its Telnames Mobile Web site Builder app for the iPhone.

Using the app, business owners can buy a domain name and create a mobile-optimized Web site by entering the name of their business, contact information, a photo, a link to their Facebook page, as well as a coupon or discount to be displayed on the site. Users who are too busy to type can also provide the information through Siri, Apple's voice-enabled assistant.

The whole process takes 10 minutes, according to the company, and the result is a basic one-column mobile-friendly site. Besides changing the site's background color, users get few customization options. This was a deliberate decision, explains Henri Asseily, chief technology officer at Telnames.

"What we've found is small business owners do not want to spend time playing with different fonts and features," Asseily maintains. "What's more important is having their contact information out so that people can easily find them."

Telnames' mobile sites, adds Asseily, do no not include advertising space except for the business's own offer since "you would not put ads on your company's homepage." In terms of analytics, users can link the URL of their mobile site to Google Analytics.

The mobile sites are maintained on Telnames' servers, according to Asseily. The app is free to download and users pay a $20.99 yearly subscription fee.