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Do You Need A Mobile Site-Or Just a Mobile-Friendly Site?

Submitted by Christina Inge on Wed, 09/14/2011 - 16:12

Time and again, when the time comes to build a new website, the question increasingly arises: what about a mobile site? Although an increasing amount of web traffic is mobile, the costs and additional development time associated with building a mobile site make this a very real question for many organizations.
Luckily, the choice is not simply between building a separate mobile site and leaving your mobile visitors frustrated.

There is a middle way—several, in fact. The least costly and fastest one is to build a site with a simple layout, minimizing columns, hover behaviors, and other factors that make a site non-mobile-friendly. This can make your design work reasonably well on most recent devices, and can dramatically cut down on development costs, as well as timelines.

Another alternative, one that is gaining ground, is responsive design. Put simply, responsive design is the use of multiple style sheets, or sets of instructions to browsers, that reassemble the layout of a site based on the device being used to view it. One recent much-touted example is the Boston Globe’s new paid content service, BostonGlobe.com. At this week’s Mobile Monday here in Boston, the Globe’s VP of Digital Products, Jeff Moriarty, demoed the beautiful responsive design of the new service, showing how it plays out on different devices, from smartphones to iPads. Responsive design is not a less-expensive alternative to having a mobile site, but it is the wave of the future, as devices proliferate and developers need an elegant way to have sites work across them all.

For the time being, if your budget doesn’t allow for responsive, creating a site that simply looks good, no matter what device someone is using to access it, remains an effective option. Think of these options when designing, and you’ll find that your site may not be mobile, but it is mobile-friendly:

 

  • Look in your Google Analytics or other analytics tool, and determine what percentage of your visitors are mobile. If it’s less than 10%, designing for mobile may not be a high priority, if it means sacrificing other functionalities. Use what you know of your target customers, too: if you’re in retail, you may have a lot of mobile visitors, but if you’re a B2B service provider, you may not.
  • Still in Google Analytics? Good! Now look at the devices people are using to access your site. Remember to test your site on those devices before your launch.
  • Don’t use Flash. It’s not mobile-friendly. If you must use Flash, don’t put any key functionalities, such as email signups, into a Flash page. (This tip is from Senior Information Architect Jim Dalglish).
  • One-column layouts render more elegantly on a mobile phone than three-column ones, so if you get a lot of mobile traffic, you may want to consider a single column layout.
  • What about hover behaviors? These are actions that happen when someone hovers their mouse over something. Try to keep them decorative rather than essential for people so people on mobile devices don’t miss functionalities.
  • Keep navigation fonts large, and choose ones that look clear on the tiny screens of smartphones.

Designing for mobile is challenging to add on to an existing web design project. Creating a mobile-friendly site, on the other hand, is a matter of some tradeoffs, testing, and thought about how people access your site today. Although it does add a layer of complexity to a new site project, it can be an alternative to a full mobile site with high usability with a lower cost.