We’ve been hearing for a while how mobile is going to take over the marketing world. Well, after more false dawns than the dark side of the moon, it looks as though the era of navigating a miniaturised version of the internet isn’t far away.
According to Ofcom, a third of UK adults now own smartphones, and a whopping 47% of teenagers. Added to this are figures (provided by Google and the British Retail Consortium) showing that mobile search is growing over 200% year-on-year, helping to boost total searches of retail sites 27%, compared to the same period last year.
So, as the figures show, it’s clear that mobile is on the march. What does this mean for your marketing? Well, for starters you need to think about what experience people are getting when they visit your website on a miniaturised screen.
There’s only so much you can fit into 240 x 320 pixels
If you’ve got a smartphone handy, why not visit your website to see how it looks (or you can enter it into Skweezer.com)?
Is everything where it should be? Or does your website look as though it’s been squashed through a letterbox?
The problem with mobile browsers is that they tend to break all a website’s elements into a single column, making it difficult to navigate or to find the information you need. And as you know, poor website design costs customers.
So what’s to be done? Well, what you need to do is to create a scaled down version of your website which only includes vital information.
How? Well, you have a few options:
1) Create a mobile app version of your website
There are a few services you can use to create a mobile app style website in minutes e.g. mobiesiteGalore, Zinadoo. The websites you can create are, however, pretty basic and severely limit the types of content and features you can include. So only really worth considering as a quick fix.
2) Create a modified version of your site.
Mobify is a service used by Threadless, The NewYorker and Wired to create mobile versions of their websites. It works simply by selecting the elements you want to include and then importing them to create a miniaturised website. This service is promoted as being for ecommerce sites and publishers, so I’m not sure how effective it will be for corporate and small business sites.
3) Create a mobile website yourself
Creating a mobile website probably sounds like a can of worms just waiting to explode and to sap all your energy cleaning up. Along with the different platforms (iPhone, Android, MS, etc) you’ve got different screen sizes and browsers to worry about. Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds.
One approach is to apply the principles of ‘responsive design’ (this article covers it in more depth). Essentially, what it involves is defining the sizes of all your website elements as a proportion of the total screen size. They will then expand or reduce in size to suit whichever size of screen your visitor is using.
Responsive website design is an approach we really believe in, as we head into the era of mobile and tablet PCs, we think it’s a trend we’ll be hearing a lot more about in the near future.
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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. Award winners BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region
