Finally your regular site is user friendly, your conversion rate is increasing and there you have the mobile website trend. So you can start all over again. Mobile websites have been around for some time, but since the introduction of the iPhone mobile internet is getting past the early adapter stage. Creating a mobile website is not just translating the one you have into something similar but smaller. Compressing a complete website into the size of a mobile phone screen is like compressing your car into the size of a dinky toy and expecting you can actually drive it. Not going to happen. The screen of a mobile phone is getting bigger with the introduction of the touch screen, but even then it’s just a fraction of the size of your screen at home.
To make your content accessible on all mobile phones you first have to choose whether you create an application or a whole mobile website. This decision still depends a lot on the functionalities you would like to offer.
Choose a mobile website if your content consists of many short articles, some pictures and sometimes a small video. For a newspaper or blog this kind of mobile website works excellent. But you have to keep it basic. Make use of the standards and conventions out there. If you would like to show your mobile website on as many phones as possible it must be scalable for different screen sizes, use only hyperlinks for navigation and make proper use of CSS for mobile devices. Key is to label your categories in a good way. If nobody understands them, navigation will be difficult for your users. Getting advice from an information architect won’t be a waste of money if there is a lot of content to choose from. When you’re not sure about the understandability of your links it is also possible to do a card sorting session. This is a common research method for regular websites, but equally effective for mobile websites.
Advantage of an application above a website is that you can ask money for it. A lot of apps are a bit disappointing after installing so paying for it can be a hurdle. That’s why many applications are also available in a light version to trigger the potential consumer. They can get used to the app and then decide to pay for the extra functionality if it’s worth it.
So choosing web or app really depends on the type of content you have to offer. If it is for content browsing like a newspaper a mobile website suits best. You can reach a lot of different mobile phones and are more flexible. If you need more interaction for your application, want to use more functionality of the phone or would like to offer a better integrated user experience then create an app.
A new benchmark study of ten Dutch e-commerce websites shows that nearly 0.9% of all internet traffic takes place through mobile devices. This is slightly higher than the 0.7% calculated in a recent benchmark survey conducted of 20 websites. Compared with normal visits (visits by computers and laptops for example), visits from mobile devices are significantly shorter, have fewer page views and transactions are done only occasionally. The mobile activity at e-commerce websites is very limited. The following differences surfaced when comparing “normal visits” with requests made through a mobile phone:
A benchmark research of 20 Dutch websites concludes that 0.7% of all internet traffic takes place via mobile devices. The devices include mobile phones, mobile music and media portable games. The Apple iPhone is currently by far the most common device to visit websites. More than half of the mobile internet hits (53%) in the benchmark study is done with an Apple iPhone. Other operating systems that frequently occur include: Windows, SymbianOS, iPod, Blackberry and Android. This top 6 is the same on almost all sites in the research. The share of mobile users in the total internet visits varies heavily per website. In the benchmark it is between 0.3% and 1.2%.
