If a small business is going to compete with larger corporations they need to take advantage of every opportunity that comes their way, and that includes having a mobile website. Small business success seems to be more about building relationships than it is about spending huge amounts of marketing dollars. It is also about being prepared to move with the times and to become early adopters. Unlike large corporations, small businesses generally don’t have to go through the masses of red tape to get decisions made. Well, a decision that every small business is going to have to make, sooner rather than later, is to get their company websites to become mobile friendly.
Today, more people are using smartphone and tablet devices to surf the Internet than those who still use the traditional desktop computer. A recent Neilson survey showed that of the adults who purchased a new phone in the previous 3 months, an astonishing 55% of them bought a smartphone. That figure was up 34% from the 12 months earlier. Further researched shows that 87% of smartphone users check their email and the Internet from these devices daily. If that doesn’t set your alarm bells ringing, the same research went on to say that 25% of smartphone users say that they mainly go online using their smartphone rather than using a computer. The reason for this? Probably because a smartphone gives us that instant gratification that we all seem to be looking for these days. So ignore these statistics at your peril, and say goodbye to the prospective customers who belong to this group.
Mobile Website
Mobile websites are quickly becoming essential marketing tools for serious businesses
If you are not convinced a mobile website is what your company needs, then you were probably one of the group of business owners who initially said that their company didn’t need a regular website and could rely on the old glossy trifold brochures and the Yellow Pages. These days, every serious business owns at least a very basic website which details their products and services and has some kind of contact form.
So why won’t your existing website meet the needs of these smartphone users. The chances are your existing website will be visible on these types of devices. But the fact that they are not designed and made specifically for these devices it means that the visitor is not going to be a good one. Websites designed for desktop computers are usually very rich graphically, they contain a lot of scrolling and are generally designed for the user to get around using a mouse. That isn’t what people are looking for when they visit a website using a mobile device. They want the website to load very quickly, there should be little or preferably no scroll, and believe it or not, very little text. Everything is icon driven and there should be just enough text to ensure your visitor has enough information to follow some kind of call to action e.g. call you, fill in a form or buy something. That is it! Stay away from Flash technology, because not all smartphones have the ability to view Flash. Have very few, but well optimized graphics that load quickly and be sure that any visitor to your mobile site can easily navigate their way through the site, using their finger. Point and click!
The fact that these people are using a smartphone, whose main functionality is obviously making phone calls. Make it easy for people to click on icon and have their smartphone automatically call your business.
You may have heard of the .mobi domain TLD, which is the mobile version of the .com or .net types of TLD. But it really isn’t necessary for you to build your mobile website on a separate domain. Why confuse your clients? Simply include smart code in your main website which detects that the platform that is being used to visit the site. If it sense that a particular visitor is using a mobile device then the code will ensure that the mobile version of the site is brought up on the screen instead of their regular website.
One final piece of advice, now that I am sure you agree you need to have a mobile website, once the site has been built, don’t forget to submit it to the various mobile directories. Right now going mobile with your website is a choice, but sooner or later it will be just as essential to your business as a regular website is today.
