The trend is clear: Business is going mobile.
Whether it’s Microsoft’s renewed emphasis on touchscreens and tablets in Windows 8, or companies like Instagram eschewing full-blown desktop websites in favour of smartphone apps, there is an uptick in “mobile first, desktop second” business strategies.
In the last few years mobile has absolutely exploded. It’s the way people shop, browse the web and check email and the numbers are increasing exponentially. Because of this, we need to shift our focus on building websites explicitly for the desktop and really start thinking about the context that our work is being seen in and interacted with. We need to rethink the way we’re building websites.
When it comes to a mobile web experience we’ve got two options: dedicated and responsive.
A dedicated mobile website is a mobile optimized version of our website that usually resides on its own domain or subdomain. With a dedicated approach we can easily give our users the option to view desktop or mobile. We’ve also got more control over resource optimization and load time.
By 2014, it is projected that more users will access the internet from their phone than from a computer. Does this mean that all of those fancy flash-based, heavy content sites will become obsolete? Will you drop an egg from an angry bird on the submit button to send a form? Probably not, but it does mean that if you do not have a user-friendly mobile presence you’ll be missing out on over half of all web browsers.
Creating a mobile version of your site doesn’t have to be painful or expensive. In fact it’s typically a smaller version of your existing website with a more simplistic design. The important thing is to identify the key actions you want your customers to take when accessing your mobile site.
There are a number of basic guidelines you need to keep in mind when developing and designing mobile websites:
- • Screens are smaller, which means the fonts are smaller, which means it’s highly unlikely you’re going to read War and Peace on your cell phone. Eliminate some of the content.
- • People are not going to fill out long forms using their phone, with coffee in one hand, while driving down the highway. It’s hard enough to dial a number while weaving through traffic. If you have a form, keep it simple: name & email.
- • File size – 3G, 4G, 12G, where will it end? Right now, however, I don’t care how many G’s your phone pulls it’s not going to quickly download a 5MB PDF of your company’s terms and conditions. Face it, phones will never be as fast as desktops or they would make desktops the size of phones. So try to limit the size of files and images on your mobile site.
- • iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys oh my! With so many different phones and operating systems you need to keep your site platform agnostic. For example, flash won’t work on your iPhone. This means all those pretty moving images and text can’t be seen from your phone.
In short, when creating your mobile presence, simpler is better. Reduce the content and file size, limit the amount of typing your customer is required to perform, take advantage of smart phone capabilities by adding click to talk numbers and location finders. Follow these steps and you will be primed for mobile Web success.
The driving force behind this trend is the expected growth in the consumer adoption of tablets and smartphones. According to predictions by market intelligence firm IDC, mobile devices will outnumber laptops and desktops combined by 2015.
There are now over 1.2 billion mobile Internet users worldwide. This exciting statistic means that business owners can no longer afford to ignore the rising tide of people accessing content via their phones and tablets. So where to from here?
The next question many are asking is mobile app, mobile site, or both? Based on the content you need to display and the service you need to provide, this decision is an important one. One thing is for sure however, retailers can no longer afford to neglect their mobile presence.
