Is your website ready for the road?

Surely you have seen people glued to their smartphone screen while walking across the street or out at dinner.

But how does business insert itself into such familiar scenarios, knowing today there are literally more smartphones than toothbrushes in the world?

First consider your website. How will yours look on a smartphone or tablet? If you are expecting people to just “pinch and spread” your website while they are viewing it on a phone, you will rapidly lose mobile visitors. There’s only so much dragging and tapping and flicking a person can endure.

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If your business targets people on the move, such as retailers, restaurants, dry cleaners, Realtors do, you just have to do better.

There are two ways to ensure that the experience of viewing your website on a smaller device is more pleasing. You may have heard of the two terms for this: Responsive Web Design (RWD) and Mobile. These are two markedly different approaches.

In creating a responsive website, you basically make your “big” website – your desktop website – adapt to the frame of whatever device a person is viewing.

With this approach, the site and its content will transform to match the width of the web browser used to view it. This allows the website to be viewed in an optimal way on every device from smartphones all the way up to large computer monitors. Since the site is programmed to conform to the device, horizontal scrolling never is required. Neither are panning or pinching to zoom as they are when viewing fixed-width websites on small devices. Buttons will be the right size to tap on small devices, etc.

Responsive web design senses the dimensions of the available screen and morphs into that receiving shape. There’s no more pinching and pulling. Everything is essentially visible from the start.

Still the content is “linearized” so that all people have to do is scroll down.

However, when people are on the fly, they don’t necessarily want to scroll down on a pre-squeezed page to read the deep content. They really just want the facts, ma’am.

Enter dedicated mobile sites

This solution carries its own URL (website address), which starts with the letter “m.” People who enter your site from a mobile phone or tablet are redirected to the “m.yourwebsite.com” version of your site.

The mobile site is custom-made to show only the essentials of what you want visitors to discover. Think of it as a way of dumbing down your website for people who need to know who you are, where you are and how to contact you.

You can tailor-make this stripped down version of your website by taking parts and pieces from the existing one, without reinventing much at all.

However, the downside to a separate mobile site is that content then has to be maintained in two places: on the regular site and the mobile site as well.

What to do?

The best approach depends on the needs of your website visitors. Do they want access to all the content on your full website when using a mobile device? Most of the time, the answer is yes – so you’ll want to consider Responsive Web Design seriously. Or will a stripped-down, more tailored approach meet their needs better? In some cases the answer is definitely yes, and then the tradeoff of having to maintain a separate mobile site may be well worth it.

In case you think this is unnecessary work and that your website will do fine for the majority of folks, know this:

Mobile-based searches make up one quarter of all searches, according to The Search Agency, and Deloitte Digital says 60 percent of mobile shoppers use their smartphones while in a store and another 50 percent while on their way to a store. Latitude says 61 percent of people have a better opinion of brands when they offer a good mobile experience.

Finally, reports are that Google may penalize mobile-unfriendly sites with lower rankings.

Need more convincing? Look at your web statistics. In Google Analytics, for instance, you can review the dramatic growth of mobile devices accessing your website. We have seen several client reports showing a jump from 5 percent of users to 35 percent of users on smartphones and tablets. That’s insight you just can’t ignore.

Whatever your conclusion, this one is no-brainer: It’s time to get moving on mobile!

Laurie Macomber, owner of Fort Collins-based Blue Skies Marketing, can be reached at 970-689-3000.