Mobile websites

Just as half the internet is still trying to get online it seems that the other half has decided that computers are old and mobile is the future. As always, it’s a compromise.  Most companies do still need a “base” website but mobile is definitely growing and by having a dedicated mobile presence you can keep customers from forgetting about you when they aren’t tied to a computer.

What is a mobile device?

You may think this is a strange question but statistics vary hugely depending on the demographic of visitors to your site.  From a truly worldwide perspective Nokia still has a very large market share.  Continents such as Africa absorb most of their web browsing in a mobile form where Nokia has a monopoly and few people have desktop computers.

It’s a very good idea to look at your website statistics to find out the type of visitors that your site is getting.  Technology sites such as this one are mainly visited with newer smartphones which can deal with more complex webpages and which makes things a lot easier.

Finally, lets not forget the new range of mobile devices, the tablets!  Is an iPad a mobile device?  Either way, if you are designing for mobile, you should design for tablets too.

Ways to go mobile

There are many ways to go mobile.  If you have the budget you can design a customised site although most sites are built via a CMS such as WordPress or Joomla.  For WordPress we have found that the WPtouch plugin provides a very nice mobile version of your site if most of your visitors are using newer smartphones and the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin provides a mobile version of your site that works with the most variety of phones.  There are similar plugins for Joomla and other CMS tools which we can help you with if you have any questions.

Dogsbody Hosting also provides a mobile webpage service that allows you to create a mobile website easily without any coding experience needed.  Create a quick site to publish your companies opening hours or offer discount vouchers to people reading your posters in the street.  The possibilities are endless.

If you have made a mobile site using the tools we have told you about here then please let us know in the comments.