Worried about being Mobile? Tips on staying current.

Mobile visitors to your website are already a big thing, and you may want to consider 'sprucing things up' if you haven't taken stock in a while.  There are three schools of thought on preparing your website for mobile traffic and there are no right or wrong answers to any of them.  

• Create a mobile website.
• Create a mobile app.
• Create a mobile friendly website.

Each of these options have their merits and pitfalls, so I'll lay them out as simply as I can and let you decide what is best option.

The Mobile Website
This is a site that is all about flexibility, it stretches, shrinks, zooms and simplifies things so that your website displays faster and friendlier... in theory.  Like any web project I've seen, this can be done really well or super bad.  The current philosophy on this is that you have your 'Desktop' website but if someone on a mobile device visits it a different 'Mobile' website, it  is served up to the user.  This site tends to have less information and an overly simplified navigation, with big fat buttons for big fat fingers.

Pros:  Easy to use, loads fast, laser focused on important content, a nice effort on your part to make a mobile visitors life easier.

Cons: Paying to have, essentially, a second website built, spotty compatibility for some devices, annoying interrupt pages or a lack of options to navigate back to the 'Desktop' site that has more information.

Suggestion:  Go this route if you have a ton of mobile users hitting your site (see my other article Google Analytics to read how), but be wary that you don't oversimplify the information presented.  People still want to know everything about you and will simply click the 'Desktop' link on your site, if they can't find what they are looking for.

The Mobile App
When we talk about Apps (Mobile Applications), we are no longer talking about a website but a standalone program.  Like Microsoft Word on your computer, an app is a program on your phone and requires an entirely different set of programming skills to create.  Identifying a quality app developer can be troublesome but once you've got a good reference things get a lot easier.  Most people think of Apple and Android, when they think of Apps, because these are the two big gorillas with the largest amount of subscribers. 

Pros: Powerful tool for delivering information to mobile users, they can be fun and entertaining and help you build brand loyalty.

Cons: Horribly expensive, and it's tough to find a quality developer who will still be in business three years down the road.

Suggestion:  Unless you're planning on creating an interactive game, a complicated resource library, or something really FUN, save your money and build a website.  There are dozens of different coding languages for Apps and nobody knows what will get dropped a year from now or even next week.  Website technology is stable and dependable and the industry is fairly standardized so that if you have a problem with a developer you can always hire another without having to re-code everything. $$$

Mobile Friendly Website
You've got a website, it's great so why change it for mobile devices?  On the whole you don't have to, but if you want to make things a bit more 'friendly' you can update your HTML and CSS to make it easier to navigate.  This is about taking a look at your current website on an iPhone or Android and asking yourself, "What do I find challenging?"  Are your links to small and difficult to hit?  Is the text on one page being resized and blowing out the design?  Is it loading too slowly over a weak wi-fi?  You can optimize your website to fix these problems and most of it is just plain common sense stuff that any web designer/developer can do for you at the usual rate.

Pros: Cheapest option by far.

Cons: I can't think of any.

To wrap this up, I want to point out one very important thing that every website owner should know:

Mobile is more than just a website.

This article may have been focused on website technology but that's just the billboard you stick in the ground.  What Mobile is really about is communication, and your strategy should be focused on creating conversations with your demographic, and less on making a pretty sign.  Do you have a video?  Put it on Youtube and Facebook, create a Fan page, get a twitter handle, sign-up your location for FourSquare and start TALKING to people.  The interaction you have with your demographic is far more important to a mobile user than any other factor.  They will be looking for easy ways to share the content of your website, to link their friends and family to deals, contests, menus, hours of operation, sign-up forms, questions and feedback requests.  A mobile website is a convention hall, where people network and share ideas, passing them along to people you may never have had an opportunity to meet.  

Word of mouth is the most successful form of marketing there is and that is what Mobile is all about.