Nov 26 2011

Adapting Your Website For Mobile Access Posted 172 days ago ago by John Clark     0 Comments

1 Wows

The two current major trends in technology today are the growth of internet and mobile computing. They are happening faster than the adoption of television or even radio. Earlier this year it was estimated that there are 835 million smartphone users now and the growth potential is huge given that there are 5.6 billion mobile phone users.

As a result mobile search, mobile ads, mobile commerce, apps and usage are exploding with growth. The image below from CMS Wire shows stats from early 2011. Smartphones are outselling both laptops and PCs now with tablets slowing catching up to PCs.
The important thing for business website owners is to adjust their web presence to make them user friendly for all devices that visitors may use to access the site. There are 3 major choices:

1. Create a custom mobile app
2. Create a separate website optimized for mobile with auto-redirect
3. Make your current site "adaptable"

Mobile Apps
This can be a good choice, especially if your business has some special things that a mobile app can take advantage of. Will you create it for Android, Apple, Windows and Blackberry or just concentrate on one? Will you be willing to keep those applications updated as often as each system requires as it's software is updated? Companies with large budgets and client base can justify the cost. Most small business will not be a candidate for creating their own mobile apps. For those wanting to go this route we can certainly help if you contact us.

Separate website
This was more of a logical choice before HTML5 and CSS3. At issue is the cost of creating and maintaining of a whole second site and content. Any website updates have to be done twice, or more. No longer the best option.

Adaptable
Making your website adaptable for mobile devices is now becoming easier and the option of choice for even small businesses and organizations. It is also called Responsive Website Design. This means that when you hit a website with a device or computer, the site can detect that device's screen size and resolution and adapt the website's content to fit that medium.

That means the photography, font size, page width, content alignment all adjust automatically to the size of the device used to access it. An example of a well known site adapting this technique is the Boston Globe. Here is a quick video of how to check out it's adaptability. Simple drag your browser width to smaller and small size, notice the photos change size and the columns and fonts adjust their size to match the screen size. For more examples see http://mediaqueri.es. Do this on most websites and you just end up with a scroll bar. There is a better way.

This can offer the best of all worlds for the average small business website, or large. You are not investing in custom mobile apps and keeping up with platforms and upgrades. You are not having to maintain two or three separate sites. One site can be made to fit most all platforms.

At Wow we will shortly be adapting this design into our current site. Try our testing site with your mobile device to see how it works: http://wowtesting.com.wowhostservices.com. Going forward we are going to be offering this as an option for all site designs and redesigns. It will give our clients the mobile edge that can make a difference in their visitor's response rate on their site. Go mobile friendly!

You need to login to comment.