Image by ttcopley via Flickr
Are you wondering if you need a mobile website? It is nothing new to consider screen size and resolution when you make decisions on the design of a template, theme or skin for a website. But increasingly, an additional display does need to be factored into design considerations. Mobile web accounts for only 1.26% of web consumption, but it is in the midst of a growth spurt, having increased more than 100% over the last two years. It’s here to stay and will continue to grow in popularity in the coming years.
The mobile web audience
This reason alone should be enough to convince anybody who is serious about getting quality traffic to their website to consider having a mobile version. Another reason could revolve around your target audience. When we think of mobile web, most of us typically picture somebody young with disposable income. While this demographic is much more likely to be using mobile web than others at any given minute, they by no means dominate the market share of mobile web users. Perhaps you remember stories in the news from the last holiday season about people using mobile web to compare prices while shopping.
Cell phone use
Most Americans have cell phones. The percentage of us who use our phones to access the Internet increased from 25% on 2009 to 38% in 2010. Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley, who has been covering the Internet sector since 1995, predicts that mobile usage will overtake desktop usage within the next three years. At this point, you have probably come to the conclusion you can’t ignore mobile web for long, but maybe you’re thinking that technology will somehow “catch up” and that websites will be viewable on both desktops and phones. Unless we go back to the days of giant portable phones, there simply isn’t enough screen space on a phone for the human eye to comfortably view the same amount of content that one could see on even a sparsely populated web page designed for desktop consumption.
Better SEO too
If you’re not convinced at this point that you need a mobile version of your website, you are a tough customer, but there is one more thing to consider before writing off mobile web right now. Everybody, even you, can agree that Search Engine Optimization is key for directing traffic to your website. One of the biggest building blocks of SEO is good coding. Well-coded sites can be converted to mobile sites relatively easy, if the sites are built with this kind of flexibility in mind. Websites that use XHTML markup are already mostly ready to go, and popular Content Management Systems like WordPress and Joomla have extensions or plugins that allow an easy switch to mobile view or automatic switching with detection of mobile devices. On my next post we’ll go over mobile design basics.
