Shimon Gurman, community manager of GinWiz, which was created by InfoGin, revealed they had seen a 250 percent jump in African users since February and 395 per cent since January.
He said: “I believe this month will be a record month not only in terms of the amount of users in general but particularly in the percentage African users make up out of the entire GinWiz user base.
“That should be at around 10 percent, up from 5.6 percent in February. Over 90 percent of these users are from Ghana and Nigeria, with each having a 45 percent share of the African userbase for this month.”
Gurman said the whole concept behind GinWiz is to eliminate the need for a third party to render a site for a mobile phones, especially feature phones. GinWiz focuses solely on mobile.
“We take your regular desktop site and make it user friendly for the mobile web-browser...”
Making use of the example of a small business, Gurman said: “People are on the go, they want to see your info on their mobile devices so they’re going to go to your website directly from their phones, but your website, since it was built a few years ago with a desktop in mind is not going to display so nicely on a mobile browser and most of the time that leads to the abandonment of the site.”
One of the organisations using GinWiz is Ghana Business News.
GinWiz offers a range of tools for the optimisation of desktop websites to mobile sites and a do-it-yourself option as well as a complete customised and tailor made option.
“Our platform does the work for you, there’s no coding involved. Any editing is visual, if you want you can define CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) values,” Gurman said.
It works by copying and pasting a URL into the free GinWiz rendering engine. GinWiz will then create a mobile version of the website, which is stored on GinWiz’s servers.
“The philosophy is that there is only one site. We define a set of rules by which a site is displayed on a mobile device, but in order for a user to see the mobile version of the site, which is sitting on our servers, you take a line of Javascript on your head tag on your homepage and users are automatically redirected... to the mobile version of the site,” said Gurman.
Furthermore, Gurman said that GinWiz receives many enquiries from African companies about building mobile sites for their clients. Ginwiz has a re-seller program, which shares profits with the companies using GinWiz.
