The growing popularity of the iPhone, Blackberry and other ’smartphone’ devices means that our consumption of the Internet is changing at a rapid pace.
Research by the ABI back in 2008 forecast that sales of mobile Internet devices would grow from 3.5 million to over 90 million in 2012. That’s a lot of existing and prospective clients visiting your website and others not on their PC or laptop but a tiny screen in the palm of their hand.
Have you looked at your website on a mobile Internet device recently?
It used to be the case that you needed to design your website with only a handful of Internet browsers in mind. As long as you catered for Internet Explorer and Firefox, with maybe a few others, you probably satisfied the majority of your website visitors. How things change.
There are two ways to view a website on a mobile Internet device.
A website that has not been designed for viewing on such a small device will still display. It is likely to be slow to load, difficult to navigate and challenging to read the content. In fact, the only real way to see what you are doing with a non-mobile Internet enabled website is to zoom in on a specific area of the page and then zoom back out to navigate. Hardly very practical or user friendly.
The alternative is to create a mobile version of your website. When visits to your website come from a mobile Internet device, such as an iPhone or BlackBerry, it will automatically detect this and serve up a special version of your website, designed specifically for use with such a device.
As more websites offer an alternative ‘mobile friendly’ version to iPhone and BlackBerry users, those websites that have not enabled this feature will be left behind.
Given the choice, will your clients regularly visit your website for the latest news, views and opinions or will they move along to a competitor who has given some thought to the way in which an increasing number of their website visitors are actually consuming online content in 2010?
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