Why should you develop a website and a mobile site?

Author: Mitch Renton 14/9/2011

With the emergence of mobile web in recent years, having a mobile site for your business or charity is becoming more important than ever. Here’s a couple of reasons why…

“There are currently 14 million mobile internet users in the UK. This figure is expected to rise to 17 million by 2012 and 19 million by 2013.”

Source: Google

“It’s estimated that by 2015 more people will be browsing the web via a mobile device than a desktop PC”

Source: Morgan Stanley

The decision to build a mobile presence brings with it many obstacles and queries:

• How to develop a mobile site for Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry and Symbian users?
• What is the cost for developing a cross-platform mobile site?
• How many different handheld and tablet display sizes are there?
• Will I have to update my website and mobile site separately?
• Do I build a dedicated iPhone/iPad app?

We believe the best solution to overcome most obstacles is to use responsive web design and media queries.

Responsive Web Design

This is a technique that enables designers and developers to produce sites that aren’t constrained by device, monitor or tablet - creative design meets creative development.

For example, why not produce a site that responds to the medium in which it’s being viewed?  Flexible layouts that responds to the users interaction with their device, whatever that maybe.

Media Queries

This allows developers to apply specific CSS styles depending on the size of the screen the site is being viewed on.  This ultimately gives lots of freedom to how elements on the page are positioned depending on the space available, resulting in the site rarely ‘breaking’.

Separate mobile websites

Of course, if your mobile users demand a completely different experience to the desktop users, then a separate mobile website is almost certainly going to be required This is can be easily achieved with our content management system of choice, and provides a great platform to deliver tailored or (often) priority content to your mobile users.

Having a mobile web presence that works on all modern devices and can cope with a multitude of display sizes is guaranteed to keep you ahead of the game in this ever changing world of web and mobile internet.

So what does this mean?

Ultimately, this means that your website is adaptive.  It means that managing your site doesn’t become any more complicated or time consuming than it already is.  You will still be using the same CMS that you know and love (WordPress of course).

But wait, I want an iPhone app!

Of course, if your target demographic is leaning towards heavy usage, an iPhone app could well be advantageous for your company.  A responsive website will work for you and is there to sit alongside your iPhone app, not replace it.