If your company has a website, then you have a website that can be accessed by any mobile phone with a browser. But the chances are that your website won’t look quite good on whatever mobile device.
You should really worry about this, but you should also know there’s a solution to it. Just as companies realized that they needed to build a website in order to stay relevant to customers, the same is happening with mobile. By 2014, more people will use mobile devices than desktop computers to use the internet, according to Gartner. In 2012, we also reached the point at which customers were spending more time on their mobile phones than on their desktop computers.
In such conditions, a site designed to be viewed on a desktop computer fails to satisfy consumers, because it’s not mobile friendly. Imagine you’re accessing such a website using the Safari browser on your iPhone. The first thing you will surely notice is that it takes a really long time to load. The second thing you will notice is that the type on the page is quite small. It will most probably take a lot of zooming and pinching to move through the website as well. In the case you have Flash on your website, it’s not going to load at all on an iPhone.
Your potential client may start looking around. According to a recent survey from Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor’s website after a disappointing mobile experience.
Yet a great deal of businesses haven’t optimized their websites for mobile devices. Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, says the company surveyed its large advertisers early in 2012 and found that only 21% have launched a mobile website.
If you’re among the other 79% or so, take note. Optimizing your website for mobile devices or creating a mobile website from scratch isn’t such a big deal.
If you’re thinking of a mobile application rather than a mobile website, Haines says to choose the website. “It really depends on the brand,” she says. “We think a mobile website is a must-have.” Haines says that for some brands, like news sites for instance, a mobile app makes sense, but otherwise, most users are going to look for you via their browser.
Create a mobile website
With every day there are more users that access your website from their sophisticated mobile devices which support the last specifications like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Its great limitation is small display that in some cases might have only 320 pixels. The big problem which you’ll be facing is going to be creating new compatible content. Without an immediate action, you will lose lots of clients, taking into account that mobile searches have increased enormously in the last years.
But this shouldn’t give you a headache. With tools like Onbile you can create your perfect mobile website using its elegant templates. There are also lots of free and paid tools for building your mobile website: DudaMobile (adapts your website for mobile devices, although you can edit it whenever you want), GinWiz, WireNode and Mippin Mobilizer (creates mobile websites from scratch, sames as GinWiz and WireNode). Unlike all the tools mentioned previously, Onbile is a DIY tool (do it yourself), meaning you can create your own mobile website using Onbile’s custom templates.
