Being Mobile-Friendly Vs. Desktop: Mobile Won, but You Might Still Be Losing
Here’s another great article about the importance of your business’ website being mobile-friendly and how it affects your online presence as well as your marketing efforts – from our friends at MarketingLand:
I think we are well beyond the point where we are making websites mobile-friendly or “mobile-ready.” Doing so still places the focus on the desktop, with mobile design and optimization just being an add-on. If that’s still they way you’re looking at it, you have already fallen behind. For the past couple of years, developers and marketers have been talking about building websites to be mobile-friendly. You hear people discuss things such as mobile websites versus responsive design and which is the right way to go. Those conversations all had their merit in the past, but they really have no business taking place today.
Mobile isn’t the future — it’s the present. I’m not saying that you don’t need a stellar desktop site. You do. But as mobile becomes more and more natural for searchers and information gatherers, you must have a mobile site that meets their needs. Failure to do so will be your death knell.
Unfortunately, I still find myself wanting to see the desktop version of sites on my mobile phone due to the mobile versions limitations. This has to change. Your visitors need to be able to do everything on the mobile site that they can on the desktop.
Mobile-Friendly = Content Empty?
You have no doubt been watching TV or spotted a billboard or read an article somewhere that had a website URL (maybe they even included a QR code – wow!) about a product or service that you were interested in knowing more about. Upon visiting said website, you possibly discovered the site was formatted to fit your mobile device’s screen, but what about that content? Someone, somewhere, decided that it would be cool to save time and money by simply populating the “mobile friendly site” with the equivalent of nothing but headlines! As in little more than just buttons identifying all the normal stuff (“about us”, “our location,” etc. etc.) with only the most minimal amount of actual content possible and THAT’S IT!
“Voila – we created a mobile-friendly site. Google will love us!”
NOT! Afterwards, if you search long enough, you’ll see in very small text a link that sends you to the “full site,” which actually sends you to the non mobile-friendly desktop site. They would’ve been better off just sending you there in the first place because the “mobile” site served to do nothing but irritate you with little/no real content, then handed you off to the oversized ‘normal’ site. SHAME!
I’ll repeat: “Your visitors need to be able to do everything on the mobile site that they can on the desktop!”
Click here to view original web page at marketingland.com
