I might be taking on a client who said (essentially) this.
I’m wondering if there are any “consumer-friendly” sites that might help to open his mind a little. Think: infographic. I’ll be trying to convince him not to use hover effects and other stuff that might be unfriendly to mobile visitors. Anyone know of a good resource?
Thanks…
[font=verdana]Of course, if he designs his site so that it doesn’t work properly on mobiles then he might find that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy … but that isn’t a route that I would go down!
Increasing numbers of people are using smartphones as a primary point of access to the internet. They’re now moving beyond the stage where they just use it to check email, Facebook, weather forecasts and train times while they’re on the move, and now consider it to be equal to a PC. In developing countries, it can be even bigger than that, where a much higher proportion of people may have an internet capable mobile phone than a PC with reliable internet access.
For example, I know that 17% of visitors to my website are using mobile phones not counting iPhones and other iOS devices (for some reason AWStats won’t separate iMobile from iDesktop in either OS or browser :(), which I estimate could account for the same again. So probably about a third of visitors are using mobiles. Who wants to exclude a third of their potential customers?
And the situation is only going to swing further towards mobiles and tablets (which will suffer similar problems as to :hover) as time goes by:
[list][]Mobile internet users to surpass number of wireless users by 2015 (US)
[]69% of people access the mobile internet daily (US, but with stats for other countries)[/list][/font]
While I agree that mobile is huge, I’m sure there’s a lot of web applications that don’t make sense on mobile.
The use cases are different, you’re not going to be doing a lot of data entry or processing on mobile.
All websites that pushing content out should definitely work on mobile though.
While it’s important to try and educate customers on the current state of play of mobile web use, it’s also presumptuous and unprofessional to dismiss client feedback about their customer base demographics - do you know their business better than them?
I’d dig deeper about the client’s reasoning on why they feel they’d have no mobile users before making contradictory recommendations. There are undoubtably use cases where mobile use percentage would be inconsequential, and hence ROI poor. Base a proposed solution on pragmatic business needs and justified analysis rather than fashion.
Thank you all for the replies. Stevie, those links are just what I was looking for. 
I fully agree with the above. I didn’t want to post a bunch of detail, but my initial meeting with clients always entails identifying who the target audience will be, so the demographics can inform all aspects of design. In this particular case, I have reason to believe the client’s site will see more mobile visitors than average. I also believe his desire for certain mobile-unfriendly elements comes not from his own research, but rather an outdated ideal of what a web site should be. For context, he was using an old version of IE, and had never heard of Firefox.