Whether your business is paying attention to mobile or not your customers certainly are.
Recent research from comScore shows mobile is now the leading digital platform, with activity on mobile devices accounting for 60% of U.S. digital media time.
For this reason alone your business must have a strategy for engaging customers via mobile.
At a minimum this means businesses will need to make sure their web site and email perform on mobile devices. Web design companies in Phoenix are generally utilizing responsive design to fulfill this need.
Responsive design know the size of device is displaying the content and delivers content optimized for that screen size.
How important is it that your web site be responsive? Google has recently changed its rankings so that if your web site is not responsive it will affect your ranking.
While mobile should be part of your marketing and business communications plan, you should begin by developing a strategy before jumping in feet first. A key component of this is developing an understanding with how your customers want to interact with you via mobile.
A simple way to start doing this involve reviewing the analytics from your current web site, look at where your traffic is coming from by type of device. You will see patterns of how your customers engage with with your web site.
A common way to analyze the data by creating customer profiles for various customer segments that engage with your web site, these are called personas. By understanding how these groups engage with your brand via digital you can tailor your web site and marketing campaigns to them. Your customers will let you know how to engage with them.
Remember that your site must be simple to navigate. Modern mobile users a quick to abandon a site if they cannot navigate your site quickly and easily. Navigation is one of the key factors for a web sites success on mobile devices.
Customer’s generally expect mobile web sites to load quickly. Pay attention to your site’s load time. Customers will give up on slow loading sites. One way to help with this is by not having an over-abundance of graphics on your site. Images should improve your user experience, not just be there for aesthetic reasons.
Photo: Jason Weaver (Flikr) http://bit.ly/1f2Ggrc
In 2015 businesses simply cannot ignore that their users are viewing their web site on mobile devices. Responsive web design has emerged as the de facto trend as it allows sites to adapt to smaller screens.
This makes the need for responsive design critical, as it adapts your web site design to both the size and connection speed of smaller devices.
A few handy tips can greatly improve the performance of you responsive web site.
Mobile First
A mobile first strategy involve designing the mobile site first and then scaling up for tablets and desktop computers. If your web site looks good and is easy to read on a mobile device it won’t be hard to read on a desktop. Starting with mobile allows you to work down your site to its essentials elements. This allows you to streamline and focus your message. Once you have locked down a design that excels on the small display of a mobile device it can easily be expanded to fit larger areas.
Navigation
Navigation is one of the most critical elements of a responsive web site. Success and failure often depends on the user experience created by the sites’ navigation. Users no longer will stumble around web sites trying to find what they are looking for. In this day and age users expect interfaces to be intuitive and easy to use. Good sites typically have self explanatory navigation.
Simplify
Desktop sites for the longest time favored complicated visual designs with massive amounts of content and many navigation options. These days streamlined, clean designs with plenty of white space are recommended for responsive sites. Not only to customers tend to appreciate the speed with which these simplified designs load but they the minimal design tends to give sites a modern look that sets them apart from older designs. It is important that sites load quickly on mobile devices and simplifying design is one of the best ways to do this.
Responsive web sites should display a consistent look and feel across mobile, laptops and desktop computers.
You can no longer ignore responsive design. It is necessary for any business.
Photo: Serge Kij (Flikr) http://bit.ly/1JStB7F
Web apps are different from native apps in that they are built using languages and standards such as HTML5 and CSS3 web tech, rather than being programmed in a platform specific environment. Therefore, apps developed using web languages can run on pretty much any mobile platform via a standards-compliant web browser. On the other hand, native apps only work on the one platform they were programmed to work on.
So why build native mobile apps? There are several reasons, such the native app technology makes for a superior user experience and they are quicker and easier to access from the interface of most mobile devices. Often native apps are the option that companies should opt for if they are looking to build deeper relationships with existing client bases, but for companies looking to save money or looking to build a presence via mobile search, mobile web development is the right answer.
While we have talked of the advantages of native apps in several previous posts, lets examine the benefits of mobile web development for applications. One key advantage to web apps, is there’s no need to develop for a specific platform. Instead, apps will work on any device that offers a web browser. Additionally, native apps typically takes a bit longer to build than an equivalent web app would, this can be a benefit where timelines are critical.
One area where developing web apps has a pretty strong advantage is with updates. Typical mobile users update their apps very infrequently, therefore, the user base for a particular native app is spread across multiple versions usually. However, having an out-of-date web app is pretty close to impossible. It is a similar situation to loading a website on your desktop or laptop computer. Each time you load a site, you are loading the latest version (unless you have a version in your cache). If we updated the logo on our homepage, you wouldn’t have to go download an update to our web site, you would just see it the next time you visit.
One of the areas where native apps have a strong advantage is their ability to leverage the phone’s hardware seamlessly. Native apps can access your phone’s accelerometer, GPS and camera but, web apps can only access GPS in a limited capacity. Web apps can’t access your phone’s camera or even utilize photos you’ve already taken so a web developed app will certainly not be the right choice in situations where you require those features.