Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

Increased Smartphone Penetration Causes Mobile Browsing to Skyrocket

If you’re like 100 million other Americans, you use your smartphone to browse the internet each month.  Whether looking for a phone #, office location, or doing online banking, mobile surfing will continue growing in leaps and bounds.  What does your website look like on a mobile device?

Think about your own internet surfing habits: if you go to a website and it’s hard to find what you’re looking for, or it doesn’t display properly on your computer, what do you do?  You leave and find another website that conveniently serves the information you’re looking for.  This is especially true in the mobile environment.  People surfing on their phones (or tablets, or iPads)  are typically on the go, and especially pressed for time.  They aren’t in a mood to deal with your non-optimized-for-mobile-device website.

When someone arrives, you want your website to recognize if they are arriving via a mobile device.  If so they should automatically be directed to a special website that is designed to display well on a smaller screen.  Technologies such as Flash and JavaScript which are commonly used on websites cannot work on many mobile devices, so your main website may not display or function properly.

For example, our main company website has large photos to better promote our work and our messaging.  It also uses technology that does not translate well to a mobile device.  As a result, if someone arrives at our website on a mobile device, this is the website to which they are automatically directed:  http://m.webtivitydesigns.com.  Sure, it looks funny on your desktop computer.  But it loads super-fast and is easy to navigate on a mobile phone.  People can easily call or email us, or obtain directions to our office.  If they are inclined they can read more about us and even visit our full website if they choose.

The investment for a mobile website is a small one.  Remember, you don’t have to translate every page of your main website into a mobile site; just give mobile visitors a few pages of the most important information they need in order to do business with you.  With such a simple deployment, you open your company to those 100 million people who surf the internet on their mobile devices each month.  And don’t forget: people who adopt and use technology tend to have more disposable income.  Don’t you want to target them?

Learn more about mobile website design.

(Don’t forget — now that you have a mobile website, you can take advantage of QR codes and Microsoft Tags!)