Over the last two posts (here and here), we looked at the big four OpCos in the UK – O2, Vodafone, Orange, and T-Mobile. But that’s not the complete picture – there are some other players, namely in the shape of Three and Virgin Mobile – that being the case, let’s take a look at their sites!
Three
I’ve got a lot of time for Three – much of what they do at a content level is some way ahead of other Operators, and their mobile portal is arguably best in class. But what of their website? You’ll note they don’t have a well-known brand colour, so they’ve bounced a number of striking shades of the white background – which I think works…. On the device front, they’ve gone for the triple whammy of the HSDPA USB Modem (nice), the Skypephone (nice again), and the N95 8GB (very nice!). As a final note you can see that Three are also controlling the size of the site within the browser window, choosing to go for more of a “widescreen” aspect.
Virgin Mobile
I wrote a post the other day about the content deal that Virgin Mobile have done with Player X, but let’s turn our attention to their homepage….
Virgin Media have obviously had their effect on the brand, with the same “mark” (logo) across all of their properties – including Mobile. Their deep red colouring I think works pretty well on the site, especially when contrasted with the grey and black accents. In terms of deals there are both Tariffs and devices, of which the latter consists of a Samsung, and two Sony Ericssons. Virgin are controlling the max size of their window and constraining it in both directions – whilst this ensures layout on most browsers, it doesnt’ fill anything like my whole browser window!
So that’s “the new guy” (although Three really are not that new now!) and the MVNO that everyone knows, in terms of their websites. Whilst there are plenty of other MVNOs (e.g. Tesco Mobile, Blyk), we have covered the six biggest OpCos – so the question, again, is “who did it best?”
Ben