As many of my readers will know I have been championing QR technology in the UK for the last 12 months, the first charity in the UK to use QR was @BullyingUK as part of their Anti-bullying poster creator a project I am very proud of.

I'm also advising a few other charities looking at this technology and how they can apply it to a huge range of charity services from just giving sign posts a digital make over to enabling advanced contact services QR is changing everything and charities are leading the way.

If you would like to talk QR with me @JohnCarnell on Twitter or email me john@technicavita.com

The mobile web is about to explode thanks to the rise of smart phones and social media but one of the biggest challenges for charities is how to make it cost effective when traditionally the mobile web has been a slow burner as far as ROI goes.

Twitter on mobile phones has changed all that and now the mobile web is coming alive with lots of new users hungry for information in the palm of their hands. This sudden growth spurt in mobile web access didn't go unnoticed by Google who is a huge player in online advertising as well as Search.

I will be talking about Mofuse Mobile Website builder in this article as well, charities can get a 20% discount from this details page.

Monetise your Mobile Website from day one!

Using Google AdSense for mobile is easy and more importantly gives a Cost Per Click (CPC) much higher than a usual adsense advert, in my experiments I would get around 13p a click on a traditional AdSense advert but on a mobile adsense advert its £1.42.

Yes you read that right well over £1 per click on mobile AdSense, the reason for this is simply because there are so few mobile web users proportional to desktop web, advertisers will pay more to acquire a click from mobile users.

Build a mobile website and monetise it in a day

Using MoFuse premium it's simple to pull in your content via RSS from your full size site add Google Analytics and generate a mobile sitemap to help the search engines find your mobile site and send you visitors.

You can add the Google Adsense mobile code directly into a section of the Mofuse site and select if you want the advert to appear top or bottom of your site.

It will probably take you less than 6 hours to do all that and that's with ample playing around time. I built two mobile websites in 24 hours it really is simple.

Advanced Redirection for Mobiles

If you want to redirect any users from your main website that are using a mobile device automatically to your mobile site you can use a bit of code that you add into your main websites template.

Mofuse provide code for both PHP and ASP to suit your development environment, this is a very effective way to boost views of your mobile website and if it's an exact copy of your main site (via rss feed) users will appreciate the easier to read presentation of the content compared to your full size site.

You can now access the entire TechnicaVita site on your mobile phone, either point your mobile browser to m.technicavita.com or snap the QR code above using your phone barcode reader and it will take you right there. (Get one here)

You can read more about how you can use QR codes and also how to build a mobile website for your charity in those articles.

Remember that depending on your mobile phone tariff you may be charged for accessing the web on your mobile phone.

Mofuse have been in contact with me and would like to offer any charity a 20% discount off any of the premium Mofuse packages, you can also use Mofuse Standard for FREE but you only get a couple of RSS feed inputs which for some won't be enough if you want to split sections down.

To get a discount code please tweet me @johncarnell or email john@techvita.co.uk

It's taken a long time to get to this point but now more and more users are getting Smart Phones like the iPhone or Android it's more important than ever to provide content that works well on mobile browsers.

Bullying UK has had a mobile site for a number of years but it always had one big difference with our main site, we could only deliver a small subset of our advice.

This was down to size of screens, download considerations and the huge amount of content we would have to update on the mobile site with each change on the main site.

I recently stumbled across Mofuse mobile website builder and not only does it create mobile sites that work across all mobile phones but it's so quick and easy you will be done in a couple of hours as long as you have RSS feeds for your main sites content.

The Project - m.cyberbullying.co.uk

When I realised how easy Mofuse was going to be to use I decided to have a go at one of my projects in a day, this basicly involves taking a project from concept to launch in 24 hours using only tools from start-up businesses and for a low cost of £0. Yes I like to stack the deck against myself from the get go. :-)

I fired off an email to Mofuse with a really brief outline of what I thought I was trying to do and asked them if they would donate an account, they emailed me right back saying they would love to and upgraded our account.

This is why I love working with start-ups they are always very happy to help and the benefit to a charity of working with cutting edge tech as you will read is huge.

Ok first things first create a site in the Mofuse dashboard once that's done and before I do anything else I need to make sure the DNS for m.cyberbullying.co.uk is setup and pointed into the Mofuse servers, instructions to do that are on the SETTINGS > DOMAINS page.

You do get a Mofuse subdomain (sitename.bxs.mobi) for testing your site but I needed the entire thing live in 24 hours so setting up the DNS now was inportant.

The reason to do this first is it can take up to 24 hours to be updated around the world, the way I have our DNS setup means changes are reflected in just a few minutes but depending on your host it may take up to 24hours something to be aware of. (I use Nettica for DNS by the way)

It involves creating a CNAME record in your main sites DNS settings (Ask your ADMIN) I would suggest using m.mycharity.com the M stands for Mobile and is the general convention the web is using to identify a mobile site as part of a main domain.

Pulling in your content to Mofuse

Remember I mentioned that one of the major problems is keeping content up to date across two sites your main one and your mobile, well thanks to the Mofuse RSS import feature it makes it really quick to pull your sites content in.

First off go to ADD ELEMENT and create a TITLE and save it then find the RSS option and add the RSS feed to the content you want on the site and save. Then go to Site Layout add both the items you created to your site layout (click the arrows) on the site layout click the RSS item and drag it to the RIGHT so it appears INDENTED under the TITLE.

This will mean a user has to click the title to arrive at the content contained in the RSS feed, with your content added your done. Now anytime you update your main website or add a new page the mobile site will be updated automatically.

Setting up your RSS feed or Feeds

Ok this is really important most RSS feeds only contain between 20 and 50 items and may only include a snipit of the content, make sure you set your RSS to include every word.

Depending on the size of your site you may need many more items in the feed to cover your entire site or the sections of the site you want to represent you also need to change the settings in Mofuse when you add the RSS feed so it will include all the items in your RSS.

Bullying UK runs an RSS for each section of the site and a master feed that tracks every page and every word on the page this is not a feed you should expose to your users its really only for purposes like this.

Making it look pretty and adding more content

You can make your site match the general colours of your main site or brand using the colour pallets drag them to the colour you want or if you know the #colour enter it and click save. You can tweak the backgrounds, header, links and text.

Mofuse has a few extra content options like maps and images you can also add static text you have written yourself if you don't want to go down the RSS route.

Stats, Mobile Sitemaps and Advertising

Stats are the life blood of a charity its how we measure success and prove the value of our work, Mofuse offer a basic stats screen that shows you visitors per day but also Google Analytics so you can see mobile site traffic in your Google Analytics dashboard

Mobile Sitemaps can be added to your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard and help Google to index your mobile site quicker and well as link in data. (You are using Google Webmaster Tools for your main site aren't you?)

I know some like to have a way to monetise the platforms you operate and Mofuse have you covered with Adsense and other advertising services just follow the instructions and your adverts will be integrated.

The end results

The entire time to create m.cyberbullying.co.uk was 3 hours and that included the learning curve which is very gentle, I really have to give much kudos to Mofuse for creating a toolset that is so easy to use I was able to create TWO mobile sites in 24 hours! :-)

I said at the start I love to stack the deck against myself when working on one of my Projects in 24 hours, I was completely blown away to be able to also get m.bullying.co.uk online at the same time and it really does show how easy it should be for any charity to convert their main website to the mobile web.

It's not just the ease of building the sites that really impressed me but also the care shown towards the more advanced tools that people like us need to measure our impact.

So there you have it, two projects launched in under 24hours for the cost of £0, in the first three days m.cyberbullying.co.uk was online over 300 people accessed the site from a multitude of different mobile phones.

The end result is more people being able to get access to Bullying UK's award winning advice at the very moment they need support, it is one of the organisations founding stones we call it "In Time Support" the advice you need at the time you need it on what ever device you have to hand at the time.

I will be speaking to Mofuse to see if they will provide a discount rate for other charity / non-profits please leave a comment below and I will pass along your desire to use Mofuse to them.

I really hope you enjoyed this look at the mobile web, Bullying UK and Mofuse.

If you have an iPhone 3GS (The latest one) then you can take full advantage of Real Time Scanning, simply hold your iPhone up to a QR Barcode with QuickMark running and it will keep "Scanning" until it detects and reads a QR code. No more taking a picture of the code and praying you got the angle right this time. Now just wait a few seconds and bingo code translated.

It's also packed with advanced features allowing you to share translated codes directly to Twitter, and even create a QR code on your phone so a buddy can snap your phone number or other important bit of data. No bluetooth Syncing to mess about with create, snap and save.

QuickMark is in the Store now and priced at $1.99/£1.29 a real bargain and works a treat.

A few years ago I started to look at how the offline and online worlds could be bridged using mobile phone technology for a project I was working on @bullyinguk , I decided to extend one of our most popular projects Click, Create and Print by adding QR and mobile technology into the mix.

Enter the QR

QR is exactly as its full name suggest Quick Response, It's ideal for anything where you want to quickly allow a user to access information contained in the code (Address, Phone Number, URL) or on the web via a mobile phone.

In Japan more users access the web and information via mobile handsets than a fixed computer, QR was developed for use in that market about 10 years ago and along with Datamatrix is the most popular form of Data Barcode system.

QR has limitations in the amount of info you can encode into it, less is better. A web address or phone number is ideal but anything more than a few words (15-30 characters) and the code becomes too complex to work reliably across a wide range of handsets and media.

Me being me I never want to just do a run of the mill reinvention of what the corporate world would come up with so I set to work inventing a solution that would hit my goal of uniting the Offline and Online worlds.

Here is the Wheel - No Reinvention needed lets Innovate

I settled on using QR with @BullyingUK's Online Poster Creator allowing a copy of the user created poster to be downloaded to the phone and shared via MMS. Bluetooth or what ever other options the users phone may have. I believe we have one of the most complex implementation of QR in the world because we handle it all on the fly at creation time, @MattBindoff and I had to invent our own proccesses to handle creating the QR code, adding it onto a posters graphic and then generating a viral widget and uploading all that information to internal and external sites like Flickr and Twitter.

The Anti-bullying Poster Widget is created at the same time a user saves their poster to the gallery, their widget can be emedded onto over 80 social sites like Facebook or Myspace and has a small Chiclet that opens up the QR code in the widget.

This creates a complete circle around the offline and online use of the codes, Each code ties directly to the users poster and allows the mobile phone to download a copy of the poster and share it with friends.

Each poster also includes a generic QR code that allows access to the our mobile site  a slimmed down version of the main BullyingUK website.

Over 23,000 QR enables posters and their coresponding widgets have been created generating over 75,000 views in just 6 months!

If you want to have a play with reading QR Codes checkout reader.kaywa.com or for the iPhone try QuickMark featuring Real Time Scanning

@BullyingUK is the first charity in the UK to use the technology you can see it in action on their Anti-bullying Poster Creator, create a poster, save it to the gallery and then print it. Each poster has two QR codes one to access their mobile site m.bullying.co.uk and the other to download a copy of the poster to your phone.

The Barcode app can be downloaded via this iTunes link, once installed open the app and take a picture of the QR code follow the on screen prompts and the code will be translated.

Note that scanning codes works best on the new iPhone 3GS as older iPhone's have a fixed focus on the camera lens that makes it difficult to capture the code with high enough accuracy.