I’ve been an advocate for years of consumer marketers, employment marketers, and others making their web sites accessible to anyone with a web-enabled mobile phone. I’ve also repeatedly reminded those folks that iPhones are wonderful, but atypical when it comes to viewing a web site through a mobile device. If you or your I.T. people look at your organization’s web site through an iPhone and pronounce it in good shape for all mobile users, think again. Only about 10 percent of mobile users with web-enabled phones have iPhones and the vast majority of the others have web-enabled phones like mine: they can access web sites but the vast majority of those sites are so messed up that they’re practically or completely unusable. Don’t believe me? Try entering your web site address into the dotMobi Emulator but be warned: you’ll likely puke when you see just how bad your web site looks on a couple of very typical mobile phones.

One solution to this problem has been to create applications — better known as apps — so that users of a particular phone can download your app to their phone and then be able to use some and perhaps all of the features offered by your web site. The apps can be designed to eliminate virtually everything from your web site except for one feature so an employer, for example, could create an app that only displays career-related information, job postings, and the application form. Very, very, very few have done so. If you belief the hype in articles such as WIRED’s “Web is Dead,” then you’d question the sanity of any marketer who doesn’t already have at least one and preferably multiple apps available for virtually every major mobile phone.

As stated so well by Todd Defren at PR-Squared.com, “You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and the New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smart phone. Another app … (etc.) … You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not the Web.”

That line of thinking takes Todd and many others in the direction of advocating that organizations create apps for just about everything under the sun for it seems clear that mobile users are in love with apps and leaving the web, even the mobile web, behind. But then Todd reads “The Great App Bubble” in FastCompany and wisely thinks again. According to Fast Company’s article, only 20 percent of consumers use free applications even after only one day of downloading it. After 30 days, that percentage drops to under five percent. Paid applications fair better, but hardly. It seems that the “value of most apps may be in satisfying the curiosity of what the app can do, not in its usefulness or relevance in a user’s daily life.”

So what’s a marketer of products, services, or employment opportunities to do? Unless you’re one of those rare marketers who needs to promote something like a wildly ambitious video game, invest your time, money, and other resources in your mobile web site as that can be used by everyone with a web enabled phone rather than a series of apps as you need a different app for just about every different type of mobile phone. Years ago, recruiters used to say that no one ever got fired for posting a job to Monster.com as it was a good, safe choice. Today, those same people should be saying that no one will be fired for devoting resources to building out a good mobile site first rather than first building a series of apps.