Analysis: Do you need a mobile website?
Mobile has been the growing trend in marketing over the last year, with the continued uptake in smartphone technology. Steve McGrath from Big Dot Media discusses the need for companies to develop their own mobile website.
In addition to this three out of every 10 people now read their emails from a mobile device, so if you send our regular email communication, on average, 30% of people will be clicking links through to you website from a mobile device.
This means that it's not really a question of 'Do you need a mobile optimised website?' but 'How quickly can you get mobile optimised site up?'
Now at this point, many companies start thinking they need a mobile app for their mobile users, but in reality a mobile app is the icing on the cake for mobile users. The actual 'cake' is a well optimised mobile website.
According to recent Taptu research the browser-based mobile web market will grow much faster than the app market, so a mobile site should be your first port of call over mobile apps.
Once you have decided to optimise your site for mobiles, the first thing you need to look at is how the needs of your mobile users differ from the needs of your desktop users.
Odeon Cinemas recently reported that traffic to their mobile website was more focussed on searches for cinema times and tickets in the short term , i.e. what was on that night, whereas traffic from desktops was more long term bases such as what was on in the next couple of weeks. So they optimised their mobile specific site for cinema locations and imminent times and dates.
This is where good web analytics comes in to play. You can filter your top viewed content by device and see if you mobile users are going to different areas of your site than desktop users. You may find that mobile users are mostly interested in your store or office locations, or just your contact details, so make sure these are easy to find from your mobile optimised website.
You may also want to consider that it is harder to read long paragraphs of text on a mobile device, so why don't you take the opportunity to cull some of that text and make it more 'punchy' to aid your mobile users.
Be sparing with images, it's even more important that a site loads quickly on a mobile device, so make sure its optimised for speed and try to avoid using Flash for anything because it won't appear on any Apple mobile device (iPhones, iPads and iPods).
Interaction with mobile websites is different as well, more and more smart phones are touch based now, but using finger gestures is a lot less accurate than clicking with a mouse (especially if you have fingers the size of mine!), so you need to allow more room for navigating and make you main buttons slightly bigger. Give your mobile optimised site more whitespace and make it easy for users to get from one page to another.
Using media queries and device and viewport specific style sheets, you can serve up entirely different content to mobile users based upon their device and screen size, so use this information to serve content that is relevant to the device that it is being viewed on.
Finally, keep analysing your stats, mobile usage can change considerably in as short as 3 months, so keep analysing what your mobile users need and react to that.
Steve McGrath, MD of Big Dot Media