Do me a favor… grab your phone and open your business’ website. Don’t have a web capable phone? Go find one, they’re everywhere. Then make other people in the office do it as well. What do you see? The results may surprise you. You could get anything from a blank screen to your whole site just smaller, and it can vary greatly from phone to phone. As more people do their web surfing from their phones this little exercise is going to become more and more important, especially if you’re paying for traffic!
Designing for desktop and mobile are two very different things. Simply displaying your desktop site on a mobile phone is often a huge mistake. The interface and design standards and the goals of the visitor are very different. This is why we are seeing an entirely new generation of Mobile Content Management Systems specifically built for mobile design. Within these systems you can rapidly create a mobile website and bring it online with all the functions that most people expect on their phone.
We have one client in a local service business with 12 offices in the mid-west that created mobile sites in just a few days using GetGoMobi.com. Some designers think that forcing mobile devices to mobile sites is a good idea, we think not. The desktop version of the site often has functionality not in the mobile site that the person may want to access. Conceptually we like to think of the mobile site as not a replacement for the desktop site but a supplement designed specifically for the needs of the mobile user.
The thing you have to realize when it comes to smart phones is that they’re taking over many people’s casual web usage. Need to look up an address, settle a bet, decide what’s for dinner, Google someone you just met, kill time while waiting for something? The smart phone is going to be a “go to” tool for that. I have some friends that aren’t super heavy internet users who have dropped conventional internet services at home completely because their iPhone or Android device fills that gap. I realize that may seem a bit extreme, but these people are out there and if you’re not looking forward for a way to make your web content more compatible with smartphones then you’re going to be in trouble as this trend gets more pervasive.
In the AdWords World we can clearly see this shift and its happening fast. So far this year we have seen dozens of accounts where the mobile traffic has grown by more than 100% in just the first 9 months of this year. In some industries we are seeing more than 10% of traffic is now mobile. In the good news category AdWords gives you control over how your mobile traffic is handled. You can configure the mobile traffic to go to a page designed for the mobile device or if your site is a mobile-wreck you can turn that traffic off and quit paying to embarrass yourself. The key here is you have to think about this because the default in the system is to engage the mobile traffic. You have to turn it off if you are not yet ready to handle it properly.
For a quick example here’s the website for Marc Ecko, a popular clothing designer, as viewed on my PC:
It’s a pretty fantastic an engaging all flash display of creative genius. Here’s Marc’s website when displayed on my iPhone:
See the problem? Although the desktop experience is excellent, the mobile visitor misses out completely. If your site has a similar problem I encourage you to go open your Adwords account and turn off mobile devices in your Adwords campaign settings. No use in paying for visitors that can’t use your site.
Now the “what to do” becomes a little trickier. You need to think about how people interact with your site and what they want. Are they after basic information like your phone number or address? Are they shopping? Making reservations? Reading? Researching? Some of these may sound odd to you but they’re not that uncommon. I’ve done searches for hippopotamus facts in a bar to solve an argument and paid my bills while waiting for flights to take off.
If you’re a localized business that provides a service or is somewhere that one would have to physically go to spend money your two big mobile needs are your address and your phone number. These are the two things people are most likely to be looking for from their phone and you need to make that information easily and immediately accessible. You could either design your page to be easily read even on a small screen, or you could create a mobile only site that visitors are redirected to when they visit with a smartphone. People like GetGoMobi can help you set these types of things up for not a whole lot of money. (Full disclosure, GetGoMobi is a client of ours).
The bottom line here is that mobile is happening and it’s happening fast. So get your team together and design a plan to deal with it.