Firstly what exactly is a mobile website? It is just simply your website being accessed on a mobile device but the purpose is that it still looks presentable even though its on a mobile.
There are a lot of reasons as to why a business should make sure that there website is accessible on a mobile phone. For example, according to (Imarketingfactory, 2011) in 2007 there were only 1 million mobile websites but by 2017 it is expected that this number will reach 150 million. Therefore businesses should know a lot of people are accessing the internet on mobile devises nowadays and they should aim to provide a friendly experience for these customers.
Firstly here are a few more important reasons as to why a business should have a user friendly website
GPS technology. This is used by many mobile users to find out necessary things or directions, by not having a mobile site for your business then you are potentially losing a customer right in your own area.
It helps in Search engine optimization as it helps improve rankings on mobile friendly search engines such as Google or Yahoo.
If your website is not mobile friendly and a person finds that your competitor is, whilst they are browsing on the net and not accessible to a computer, that individual could switch to your competitor instead making you loose out on a customer
and lastly
Smartphone popularity. Smartphones have become affordable over the past few years and are really excellent for hand held browsing. Since the sale of smart phones is increasing, it only makes sense for companies to have a site that can be easily browsed through on these devices.
(Imarketingfactory, 2011).
Now unto making sure that once you've gotten a mobile website it is actually optimized correctly. A mobile optimized website is a website that is optimized for mobile devices which means it has been designed and formatted to read and navigate easily on the small screens of mobile devices (Yellowschmello, 2011). Mobile optimization is important because you want to make sure your website still looks decent when viewed on a smaller screen because a lot of the content formatting can change once its downsized.
I found out quite a few things on how optimization for a mobile device is done and how it differs a bit from the normal optimization for a website that's viewed on a PC. Also what businesses should consider when coming up with a user friendly website. This may even help for when Simplified Education comes up with a mobile website.
Firstly, people viewing your website on a mobile device just want the important information. For instance, on Papa John's mobile website, they know their target audience just want to order pizza so the mobile website doesn't include things such as investor relations, and customer services etc. on it. This makes there website so much more accessible and that's why there website is deemed to be user friendly (Socialmediaexplorer, 2013).
You are going to need to change the look of your website onto a mobile website by some sort of formatting. This can be done by CSS which stands for Cascading Style Sheets. It is a style language that defines layout of HTML documents. For example, CSS covers fonts, colours, margins, lines, height, width, background images, advanced positions and many other things (HTML.net, 2009). Epsilis (2009) state that if your website is already standard based and uses CSS then it is quite likely that you can use another CSS presentation can be created just for the mobile phones. This way, not much changing has to be done on the existing website formatting.
your
website is standards based and uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) rather
than tables for presentation then it is quite likely that an
alternative CSS presentation can be created just for the smart mobile
phones with little impact on your existing sit - See more at:
http://www.epsilis.co.uk/services/web-optimisation-for-smart-phones.aspx#sthash.wlRiGyj6.dpuf
If
your website is standards based and uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
rather than tables for presentation then it is quite likely that an
alternative CSS presentation can be created just for the smart mobile
phones with little impact on your existing site. - See more at:
http://www.epsilis.co.uk/services/web-optimisation-for-smart-phones.aspx#sthash.wlRiGyj6.dpuf
If
your website is standards based and uses CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
rather than tables for presentation then it is quite likely that an
alternative CSS presentation can be created just for the smart mobile
phones with little impact on your existing site. - See more at:
http://www.epsilis.co.uk/services/web-optimisation-for-smart-phones.aspx#sthash.wlRiGyj6.dpuf
Or if you can't change your CSS format on your website to suit your mobile, then another seperate website has to be created for your website.
Other things that have to be taken into consideration is the prevalence of iPhones. iPhones don't process flash currently (Epsilis, 2009) which means that any flash operating on your website won't work on a user accessing your site on their phone.
To sum it up, every website needs a mobile version in this day and age but its just what needs to be done to process it hinders a lot of companies from proceeding. However the research I've found out shows that the pros really outweigh the cons.
References
Html.net (2009) "What is CSS"[Online] <http://html.net/tutorials/css/lesson1.php> Accessed June 3rd 2014
Epsilis (2009) "Website Optimisation for Websites"[Online] <http://www.epsilis.co.uk/services/web-optimisation-for-smart-phones.aspx> Accessed June 2nd 2014
Imarketingfactory (2011) "The Importance of having a mobile friendly website" [Online] <http://www.imarketingfactory.com/mobile-website/> Accessed June 2nd 2014
Yellowschmello (2011) "What is a mobile optimized website" [Online] <http://yellowschmello.com/what-is-a-mobile-optimized-website/> Accessed June 3rd 2014
SocialMediaExplorer (2013) "What Mobile Optimization does for your website" [Online] http://www.socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/what-mobile-optimization-does-for-your-website/> Accessed June 3rd 2014
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