Apps vs mobile-friendly website – the choice is yours

Apps vs mobile-friendly website – the choice is yours

Modern businesses can no longer ignore the fact that pretty much everyone has a smartphone or a tablet device, which means that the humble internet website is no longer enough from a digital marketing perspective. You’ve spent time and money on website design and you’ve got a fantastic website – the next step is to either optimise it for mobile devices or design yourself an app.

Why mobile-friendly design should be a priority

Apps can come later, but your website needs to be accessible from mobile devices right now. While a recent survey by Flurry has shown that apps continue to dominate the mobile market, with people spending the majority of their time using them, users are still spending 14% (around 22 minutes a day) browsing the web.

Prioritising mobile-friendly web design makes sense too, as:

• You can use your existing content and code base
• Apps take up valuable memory on users’ devices
• You can reach customers on all devices, compared to apps which you’ll need to design for every OS
• It’s much cheaper!

When users encounter a website that simply doesn’t work properly on their device, they will simply go elsewhere.  A lot of users may not even get that far, as a blog post by Google has revealed that it will start informing browsers when its algorithms come across pages that won’t work on their devices. This is essentially flagging up to potential customers that you are behind your competitors when it comes to innovative web design, as well as alienating users visiting from certain devices.

Tips for optimising your site for mobile

If you want to embrace this key web design trend and make your website more convenient for customers on the move, you’ll need to know where to start. Here are a few key points to consider:

• You need to ensure that every important part of your website functions perfectly in mobile. To do this, you must firstly identify the essential elements of your site, from e-commerce to customer support.
• Think about what customers actually want to do on your website. Do they want to order quickly and easily, find contact information or simply waste some time reading or viewing something interesting? Whatever it is, make it easy for them to do it.
• Make efficient use of screen space. You have a much smaller screen to play with when optimising for mobile, so you’ll need to use it as efficiently as possible whilst still maintaining the aesthetics of your website. The Next Web has some great tips for making use of menus and planning the layout of your new mobile site so that it is responsive, adaptive and meets customer needs.
• Consult an expert. If you have no experience in web design for mobile devices, you’re going to need some professional help. Consult a web design specialist, as well as a professional digital marketing company to develop a coherent, dynamic plan for your new and improved mobile-friendly site.