You’re on your way up to Tahoe to do some skiing. The roads are clear and you’re rolling, fully stoked for all the new snow. You know the weather should hold, but you’ve just GOT to double check. You whip out the iPhone, dial up a ski resort website to get the current conditions. Sure you’ve got the latest and greatest mobile web browsing device, but even the best designed websites aren’t super functional when you decrease the screen size by 1000 pixels, take away the keyboard and reduce all those flash graphics to little F icons. So you hunt and peck and eventually get the info you need, or maybe you give up and just drive a little faster…
Mobile devices are connecting to the web at increasing rates. With high speed broadband making browsing, searching and downloading faster and new devices making it easier, we’re seeing more and more users browsing our client’s sites from iPhones, Palms, Blackberries and other devices and smartphones.
But often the needs of a person browsing from a mobile device and the device itself are quite different than what the site was originally designed for. From what we have observed, such is the case with destinations and ski resort websites, and so a mobile site is in order…
Heavenly Ski Resort Mobile Site
We’re happy to announce the launch of the SkiHeavenly Mobile site! Just visit skiheavenly.com on your iPhone or other mobile device and you’ll automatically be redirected to a page where you can choose from one of two mobile site formats which work best on different devices. Or, if you want to stay on the full site you can select that and go back to the home page and continue browsing.
From our experience, the needs of a mobile website user can vary. The heavenly mobile site feeds up mostly information in the form of news, conditions and media updates, and resort info and data. The result is an easy access look at the mountain from anywhere your data plan works, whether that is from a South Lake Tahoe hotel WiFi Link or the 3G network in downtown San Francisco.
Mobile Site Features
Standing in line at a South Lake Tahoe starbucks and want to see which part of the mountain has the best (or worst) weather? Click over to the heavenly mobile webcam page and check them all out.Want to know the latest Heavenly snow totals? It’s right on the front page with the temp and current weather. Click through to read the daily conditions narrative, and if you need even more click through to view the full report on the main site.
While you’re chilling in the airport waiting for your connecting flight, keep the stoke burning and check out the latest Heavenly TV videos from the terminal over the free airport WiFi. The blog page also features more content from Twitter and the Heavenly Blog so you can stay up on the latest wherever you are.
Click “Info” and you’ll find a simple text list of information links for Conditions, Directions, Roads, Tickets, Lodging, Ski School, Trail Map and Contact. It’s all really simple and loads up quickly. The “Roads” link on the info page takes advantage of nvroads.mobi and the CalTrans mobile road info search page.
The mobile site even has an iPhone icon image so you can bookmark it to your home screen like an app on your iPhone or Android phone. So check it out and let us know what you think!
Tahoe Mobile Sites
We’re pretty stoked to get another Tahoe resort on the mobile web. Last fall we launched m.skialpine.com and m.skihomewood.com while the Nevada Commission on Tourism was launching skitravelnevada.mobi and nvroads.mobi. So when you travel to Lake Tahoe for some skiing and riding, remember to check conditions of the roads and your favorite ski resorts from your phone as soon as your plane lands!