A recent study by Cisco suggests that mobile data traffic will increase by a factor of 18 by 2016. Another study by Street Fight suggests that 33% of searches for local business comes from a mobile device.
“The notion of a trading catchment area is a decades long concept – really understanding where your customers come from – and it’s important to know where your business falls. When you think about advertising, and particularly location-based advertising, going forward, this notion of a trading or catchment area, is going to be critical.” – Dr. Phil Hendrix of immr.
So you’ve come to the realisation that your business needs a mobile website. Where do you go from here? Let’s look at the options.
Responsive vs Adaptive (separate mobile site)
A responsive website is the same website as the one you would view on your PC, except it has been programmed to detect the size of the screen and rearrange, scale and optimise the site for any sized screen. A responsive website will provide the best user experience and also has the least amount of maintenance, i.e. no duplicate programming for the main site and the mobile site. Adaptive mobile websites are simply a redirect to a completely different mobile site, dedicated for a mobile phone, the drawbacks of an adaptive mobile website is that there is extra maintenance and they don’t cater for tablets.
What factors should I consider when building my mobile site?
It’s important to cater for your visitors that may be in areas of poor mobile reception. Your mobile-optimised site should have minimal images, be built using HTML5, with artwork and styling rendered in the browser. This will decrease the page size and eliminate frustration of your potential customers waiting for your page to load, and therefore increase your chances of conversion or being contacted by the visitor.
Mobile Websites vs Native Apps
Both have their place in the world. A mobile website is better suited to people making searches for your business via search engines, whereas a native app generally has a specific purpose and needs to be marketed separately via its respective app stores.
