Increase your reach with a mobile site

If creating a mobile website for your business is not your number one New Year’s Resolution you may want to reconsider your priorities.

We’ll share the statistics. Google reports a 400% increase in mobile searches in the last year, and 20% of its searches now are from devices mobile. By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online, according to Gartner.  In Jamaica, our penetration of mobile devices is an astounding 107 percent, with 2.97 million subscribers.

That’s a lot of prospective customers you might be missing if your website isn’t optimized for mobile devices (BlackBerry, Android or iPhone).

Just as companies once realized that they needed a website to remain relevant to consumers, now mobile is the go to tool for marketing. Consumers spend more time on their mobile devices than on their PCs, and companies must position themselves to tap this market. 

Unfortunately, more than 90% of websites are not mobile friendly.  A website designed for a widescreen desktop monitor does not translate well on a mobile device: sites take long to load; it is difficult to navigate and access content; page type is small; it takes a lot of zooming and pinching to navigate the site; Flash may not show on your smartphone.

So a prospective customer soon starts looking elsewhere. The bounce rate for mobile devices that access non-mobile-friendly websites is more than 90%.

So if you want to capture that part of the market, here are a few tips for building a good mobile website and getting ahead of your competition:

• Ensure that your design is clean and sleek so it uploads quickly.
• Use large thumb-friendly buttons that human fingers can handle.
• Avoid Flash or JavaScript, as it’s a safe bet that not all mobile devices will be able serve up either of these technologies. 
• Ensure navigation is easy to use and keep in mind that font size should be fairly large.

An effective mobile site is one that reformats the content based on the size of the screen, whether it’s a tablet or a mobile phone. The advantage of this is that it will save you having to worry about maintaining separate sites.

Here are some more compelling statistics:

• More than 75% of the world’s population owns a mobile device.  That is 5 billion people with phones in their pockets!
• More than half of all new Internet connections are through smart phones.
• The mobile market is already 5 times larger than the Internet and growing daily!
• There are more than 250 million active users (50% of total users) currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices.