As more people are moving to tablets for daily web surfing and ditching their old flip phone for a smart phone, it makes sense that more and more of your website traffic is going to be “mobile”. Depending on the site, mobile traffic can be well over 50% of all your traffic.
With this major shift in surfing behavior, business owners need to be sure their website looks good and treats those mobile users right.
A website that requires a smartphone user to “pinch-zoom” and scroll all over their website is going to see a drop in page views and engagement from those users. To improve the experience for mobile users, we need to offer up a website that is designed for them.
Picking a Mobile Strategy:
There are several ways to go when deciding how to “make your site mobile”.
a. Redo your site with “Responsive design”
b. Offer up a different ‘mobile version’ of your site
c. Create an “App”
d. Do nothing and let the mobile users suffer
Let’s look at each approach.
Responsive Design:
This may be the best way to go, but can also be the most expensive. A responsive site is designed to reformat itself depending on the size of the browser window. As the window goes from a huge desktop screen, down to tablet size and then to a smart phone, the design automatically adjusts to fit well and look good.
You can tell a site is responsive, even on your desktop, by grabbing the right hand border of your browser window and sliding it to the left. Instead of cutting off images and text, the site keeps adjusting itself as the browser window gets smaller. Here’s a good example from Capital One.
While it works great, there is going to be a high costs of development compared to some other solutions. So this solution would be recommended if, for instance, you have already been planning a website design overhaul. Be sure to insist your web-design team uses Responsive Design.
Mobile Version of your site:
A simple mobile site is a good step that you can take now. It is fairly inexpensive to implement, and it gets you that mobile site you need. Your web team can either create mobile versions of your pages, or you can use a third party tool such as DudaMobile. (aff*)
With this approach, when someone visits your site with a mobile browser, your web-server redirects them to mobile versions of your pages. Most of these systems will even update the mobile pages when you update your desktop site, so keeping things in sync is not an issue.
Create an APP:
There are compelling reasons to have an APP created for your content. For one thing, you can really offer some great features through an app, one of which is the ability to push out updates as alerts on a phone. I’m raising money for Movember.com this month (and trying to grow a moustache). (Donate here if you wish). They offered a cool app that lets me quickly check up-to-date donations, sends me a reminder once a week to update the sorry looking moustache photo, and allows me to post a quick update to my status page.
If you have people that are passionate about your brand and interact with you on at least a weekly basis, then it might make sense to go the App route. But for the rest of us, the expense is probably not justified.
Do Nothing:
There is another choice of course. That’s to do nothing and let your visitors suffer. Depending on your site’s traffic and the complexity level of your site, this may be the best choice. As with most things, there is no one answer that’s right for everyone.
If you’d like me to review YOUR mobile situation and give you my opinion, please feel free to contact me.
Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you will stick around and read more.
If you have any questions, feel free to drop me a line at andy@andycommons.com.
-Andy 406-962-5683