With the recent release of the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, the lure to take your site mobile will be stronger than ever—but should you?
Loading up your site on a mobile browser can be a real eye-opener. In a best-case scenario, what you’re greeted with is a smaller version of the site you are used to seeing on your desktop. Although devices like the iPhone are more than capable of viewing “full” HTML websites, all that double tapping and pinching can get pretty tiresome.
The reality is that not all sites are particularly suited to having a “to go” version. Of course, there are the obvious ones—news, weather, finance—but most of these areas are pretty well served by the built-in apps on mobile devices. It takes some creativity to figure out what makes your particular business work on the go. So when considering the mobile option there are some important questions to ask:
What part of my site would be the most valuable to somebody on the go?
This could be as simple as your contact information—a mobile business card of sorts. I know I’ve been in situations where I was looking for a phone number or directions and went to a company’s homepage to find them. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes not so much. Ideally, a site will have a properly formatted phone number that becomes clickable allowing one-touch dialing. Adding in a link to your location on Google Maps will make you that much more accessible.
Am I doing email marketing?
One of the most common uses of mobile devices is for checking email. If somebody decides to follow a link in your email creative, it’s definitely at least worth a look to see what he or she would be presented with. Creating a mobile-specific landing page for your email creative could be a nice, low-impact way to experiment with incorporating mobile into your online strategy.
Could I trim my site down to just the basics and be happy with it?
Is it even possible to distill your site into small bite-sized chunks? Sites that are more information heavy, requiring users to spend time flipping through each section, fill out forms or pore through material in large PDFs are obviously not places somebody wants to visit on the go.
Do I want to maintain multiple versions of my site?
And you thought the early days of the web with browser-specific versions of your site were over. With browser detection and alternate CSS files used to serve up a mobile version of your site while keeping your full site intact for desktop visitors, the process is more manageable now. Still, you will have to consider the implications of any architectural changes across multiple platforms—although the statistics seem to support targeting iPhone if you just want to get your feet wet with mobile. According to Net Applications, of all mobile browsing platforms, iPhone has the largest market share with almost 65% as of May 2009. Google’s Android is in a distant second with almost 8.5%. As of this post, data still isn’t available for WebOS – the operating system use on the Palm Pre.
So is now the time to fire up the grill and get started on a mobile presence? It would seem so. At the least it’s definitely time to start thinking about it.
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