The Washington Post has revamped its mobile offerings to better align its online strategy with its mobile property.

The new mobile site offers Washington Post news and analysis in a mobile-optimized fashion, keeping in mind that consumers accessing the information are on the go. Amtrak has signed on as sponsor of the redesigned site's launch.

"For us this redesign was about consistency in strategy and not just about having a consistent brand experience online and on mobile," said Guy Vidra, head of business development and emerging media at Washington Post, Arlington, VA.

"We are really focused on serving audiences across all platforms and we are keenly focused on our local audience and providing a useful offering for them," he said.

The site is now made up of five main sections: politics, business, metro, arts and living, and sports. It is formatted in an easy-to-navigate layout, which will now be managed by two mobile editors dedicated to updating content and managing breaking news alerts on the WAP site.

Users in the Washington, D.C.-area will have access to customized weather, breaking sports scores and key regional news stories.

In the very near future, visitors to the site will be able to make a restaurant reservation, buy a movie ticket and conduct other transactions directly from the site as well as receive real-time traffic routes integrating Google Maps and GPS.

The mobile site is built on a proprietary platform that is entirely new to the company.

The Washington Post narrowed down the mobile homepage's presentation, keeping in mind the small screen of a mobile phone. It went from 11 to five sections.

Lately a lot of players in the mobile space are updating or redesigning their mobile offerings.

For example, Fox News Mobile just underwent a design change to make the site look and feel more like Foxnews.com to create a more consistent brand experience between its Internet and mobile properties (see story).

Consistency in the brand experience is important and helps consumers identify with a brand and maintain familiarity with its content, products or services.

"We were undoubtedly behind the game a little with our mobile strategy and we needed to bridge that gap," Mr. Vidra said. "We see so much traffic from RIM and iPhone and it is important to optimize for them.

"On some devices we are doing richer media units and have and will introduce new forms of advertising where applicable," he said. "We've got some interesting things with BlackBerry in the next few months.

"We built the entire mobile site in-house and we've got the infrastructure down now and will manage our mobile business ourselves," he said. "This really speaks to how critical mobile is for us."