With an increasing number of mobile web visitors its important to make sure the mobile experience is as good as the desktop experience. With a number of smart phones including the iPhone not supporting Abobe's Flash technology it's essential to provide an alternative.

A good example is British Supermarket chain Morrisons. My task was to find the opening times of my local store, I achieved this quickly however the bulk of the main page was not viewable because no alternative to Flash was provided.

Looking at the same page through a desktop browser this section provides latest offers.

Even though my goal in visiting the site was not to see the latest offers I still had the intention of visiting a local store where I may have been influenced by what I had seen on the website.

By not providing a Flash alternative Morrisons are missing out on one of their top conversion points - the main banner on the front page of their website - i.e. the section that the majority of the visitors will first see.

Alternatives would be very easy to implement - an image of offers could be displayed instead of the message telling me to install Flash or the Flash section could be recreated using JavaScript.

We are pleased to announce the relaunch of our iPhone Videos website. The site features the best videos showcasing iPhone previews, reviews, apps, games, hacks, tricks and unlocking.

Originally launched two years ago the site has been at the forefront of all videos to do with the iPhone.

See more on www.iphonevideos.net

Google will be phasing out support for Microsofts eight year old browser starting in March. This is great news for anyone who has to develop for IE6 and for users who haven't found the benefits of a modern browser.

You can sign an online petition on the number 10 website to force the Government to phase out IE6 in its departments.

Full details from Google:

"In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team"

Just a quick update this week as I've been busy working on my book. I've launched a new website that has all the best deals from Argos.

www.argosdeals.co.uk

Check it out for some great offers.

Cinema chain Cineworld have put in some serious work into their mobile site over the past few months concentrating heavily on exploiting latest technology to improve usability.

The updated site fits nicely on the iPhone screen, automatically finds your local cinema and suggests others nearby.

After selecting a film you can click on a time to book tickets through the mobile site.

The improvement in using the mobile site over the normal site on the iPhone is huge and finding film times for your local cinema is much faster.

The Google Chrome beta for OS X is out and I've been using it for a few hours - here are some of my thoughts:

1. Dislike: Not being able to see the full page title is annoying

In all other browsers the page title is shown on the top bar of the window, this isn't such a problem for sites such as ImAFish where the title doesn't change but for Google Mail for instance the title changes when you have new mail.

2. Like: The speed is awesome

The whole experience in Chrome feels fast, pages load quickly and the interface is snappy. Compared to Firefox this is a huge improvement (scrollbar lag has been driving me crazy recently in FIrefox), the speed seems to be on par with Safari.

3. Dislike: No status bar is annoying

When you mouse over links in other browsers you can see almost the full address of where the link is going in the status bar. However in Chrome you just get a little box appear at the bottom which shows you a truncated version of the link. Again I don't see what Google hope to gain by not showing the whole link.

Above: When putting your mouse over the title of the article only part of the URL is shown.

4. Dislike: Tab Mess

Often at work I will have at least 15 tabs open with various projects on the go - Google Chrome makes it very hard to distinguish between them when you have a lot open.

Adding in lots of tabs doesn't scroll them or add them onto another line - you just get lots of little tabs.

5. Like: Maximum Real Estate for Web Page

By removing titles, the status bar and other parts of the browser it does mean you have the maximum amount of space to see the actual web page, though as I've pointed out this does have its downsides. 

About two months ago I sold my first website on Flippa.com, a site dedicated to buying and selling websites and domains. Launched earlier this year by a team from the internet resources site Sitepoint the marketplace is like Ebay for buying and selling websites.

The site I sold was www.ipodhistory.com, I originally bought the site from the Digital Point Forums about 18months earlier for $180 (£90 at the time), it was my most expensive site I had bought and was a relatively big gamble. Over the following year and a half I invested in search engine optimisation, added new content and grew a community. In this time I tripled the traffic and advertising revenue. 

I listed the site on Flippa and immediately received interest and a number of offers. After around two weeks the site sold for $2000 (£1300). I was paid through PayPal and the transaction went very quickly and smoothly. 

You can list sites on Flippa either with an auction style listing or where people submit private bids for a site. Flippa charge a listing fee with various optional extras (about $28 for my site) plus a final value fee of 5% (with a cap of $498). 

It's sad to see the iPod History site go from my portfolio but I'm more than happy with the return on investment.