Building Your Online Brand: The Mobile Web & Your Online Presence
An increasing number of people browse the internet on their mobile phone or tablet. As cell phones get smarter, and tablets become more commonplace, mobile users will only grow in number. As a small business or organization, it’s important to consider mobile technology when developing your website. To not do so will only frustrate your customers and clients if they try to access your website on the go.
Generally speaking, tablets (such as the iPad or Galaxy Tab) tend to faithfully display websites as they are intended. On a mobile phone, however, a typical non-mobile layout tends to break, fonts become unreadable, and navigation becomes uselessly small. For accommodating your mobile-savvy customers and clients, you have a few options for your website:
A mobile version/microsite
A script detects if you’re accessing the website using a mobile phone, and redirects you to an alternate version with a mobile-optimized layout. Until recently, this was the most common solution for smart phone friendly websites.
Pros:
- You can limit the amount of information since the mobile site is technically a completely different website. For example, a busy site with many news articles and a lot of navigation could only display a services list, hours of business, and location map to mobile customers.
Cons:
- Are you repeating the same information on two different sites? Search engines might penalize you for this, though there are certainly ways around this problem.
Responsive or “mobile-first” design
Using the magic of CSS media queries, a responsive website displays a different layout when it detects the screen width. This blog is a responsive site – try grabbing the resize handle on your web browser, and drag it to make your window smaller. The site information will flow around a narrower grid. If you visit this blog (or any other responsive website) on your smart phone, the layout will fit to a narrow page width, allowing the text to still be legible at small screen sizes.
Pros:
- Responsive sites display the same content for mobile and desktop computers – no more limited microsites for the poor smart phone users.
- There is indication that Google will reward responsive web design with better search engine rankings in the future.
Cons:
- You really do have to develop the entire site at once to make it fully responsive. You cannot easily take an existing website and add in responsive layout – so this option really is only for brand new sites, or complete redesigns.
Mobile apps
People have a tendency to misuse this word. An app is technically downloadable software, not a website. Large web services like Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest have apps. Some stores, restaurants, banks, and other services have apps. Apps can be paid (Angry Birds) or free (Vancity Banking).
Pros:
- If your website is an online service that people interact with on a regular basis (for example, a popular forum, a store with frequent online coupons or specials, or a chain restaurant with a location search) an app may be more engaging to your customers.
- Because apps use the mobile phone’s interface, it can be easier and faster for customers to use than a website.
Cons:
- The development costs for an app are considerably higher than a mobile web site.
- It is necessary to provide technical support and updates to accommodate different mobile platforms (iOs for iPhones, Android, etc.)
A note on mobile content & behaviour
Do people browse the internet on their phones the same way as their desktop computer? Generally, I don’t browse the internet for hours on my phone. Rather, I’m usually looking up quick information, e.g. store hours, a restaurant location, or the time an event starts. When developing a mobile strategy for your website, it would make sense to consider what information is important to someone on the go. It frustrates me a lot when I can’t find what I’m looking for easily on a little screen! What kinds of things annoy you when you look up websites on your smart phone?