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FiddleFly Brings Cookie Cutter Design to Mobile Web Builders

By / September 8, 2011 12:15 PM / View Comments

This post is part of our ReadWriteMobile channel, which is dedicated to helping its community understand the strategic business and technical implications of developing mobile applications. This channel is sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent. As you're exploring these resources, check out this helpful resource from our sponsors: Cultivating a Developer Ecosystem: Understanding Their Needs

FiddleFly_150x150.jpgIt was a matter of time before a mobile development company made a framework that makes it very simple to create mobile Websites. Web2Mobile has launched a product called FiddleFly that allows companies to easily create a mobile presence with templates, themes with drag-and-drop ease.

Mobile and Web developers have been dreading it, but the cut-and-paste revolution that dominated late 1990s Web design is coming to mobile. Unlike the 1990s though, where Web pages were static digital posters, the mobile version of this evolution can at least create dynamic sites that users can interact with on their smartphones and tablets.

FiddleFly is somewhat of a unique product. DudaMobile provides a very similar mobile Web design studio but other than that there are not a lot of companies focused specifically on creating mobile Web presences for small business. Blogging software Wordpress optimizes websites for mobile and considering the company's explosive growth, many users may be using it to set up their mobile sites as well.

There are a variety of companies that provide the same template-based cut-and-paste service for native applications. Boilerplate and iBuildApp are examples of many templates and frameworks that are lowering the bar for native app development. Appcelerator is easy to use ... if you already know how to program.

FiddleFly_610.jpg

That is what FiddleFly is marketing: a mobile website build and design service for those that do not know how to code. FiddleFly also wants to position itself as a way for franchises to distinguish themselves on a granular level by leveraging the marketing opportunities (coupons, deals etc.) that customize mobile websites bring.

Mobile Web designers: What is your reaction to new services like FiddleFly? Are we going back to a mass of websites that all look the same, back to the era of Netscape and boring design? Or are services like FiddleFly a good thing for the development community? Let us know in the comments.

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