Everyone seems to be scrambling to get a mobile site. The belief is that it will skyrocket sales and if you don't start now, you will be left behind. We want to offer a different opinion: only adopt a mobile strategy if it is something your users will absolutely love and use. If executed correctly, it will provide an ROI long into the future.

Checklist

Before rushing out to develop a mobile version of your website, there are some questions to answer.

Who is Your Target Market? If your target market uses their mobile devices to access any of your information and does so frequently, then this may be a valuable choice to make. You want to offer products and services that make life easier for your customers. If 90% of your users would use the mobile site, go right ahead and give it to them.

Responsive v. Mobile Specific - While both cases are valid, having a responsive site can limit your flexibility to develop features unique to a mobile platform. After all, you have a whole new tool to capitalize on! Having a responsive site can be most beneficial as a placeholder until the mobile site is built or until the budget allows it, but if you have the opportunity to build mobile specific, take it.

Starting with Desktop or Mobile - Some companies start with a mobile site because it can be easy to expand to a desktop site. While this is certainly the case for graphics and adding information, the layout and UX are completely different, and people often ignore their specific advantages. Mobile sites that grow into desktop versions often retain the large amount of scrolling and stacking of information that is no longer necessary. Desktop sites that translate over don't consider the graphics quality or the need to simplify the navigation for mobile users.

How to Start - The first thing is to have a meeting with your web team. You want to get both the business and technical teams on the same page so that each phase of the project goes smoothly and the result truly helps the end user. You want the opinion of marketing, key business stakeholders, and the web team because each person helps formulate a valuable piece of the puzzle.

Example: City of Colorado Springs

When building a new website for this city, we had a few obstacles. We needed to understand how the end user interacted with their website on a daily basis. We had some basic challenges to overcome in transferring the information to a mobile version.

The market of this website definitely has mobile users because they are catering to city population. We knew they would need a mobile website. We would do a mobile specific website because this platform has some great advantages that we wanted to capitalize on. A mobile site also lets users travel to the full site if needing more information instead of responsive, where they are already accessing the full site.

The city already had a desktop site, so that's where we started to figure out how to provide easy access to all the information. From some research, we knew people the types of content people were accessing, which helped us trim down to allow for quick and intuitive searching.

Handy Tips for a Mobile Site

Mobile sites can provide tremendous value for users and build a solid customer base for the company, but there are some aspects often overlooked during the design process.

Link to Full Site - Many mobile websites treat the platform as an entirely separate feature from the desktop site. While this is true, users should have access to both. A mobile site is catered for a specific use case and doesn't usually contain all the information a desktop site would. Giving users the options to access both versions provides additional value.

Information Architecture - Even with providing a link to the full site, you should provide all information from your full site on the mobile version. This lets users access everything, but within a trimmed down version catering to the advantages of a mobile device. While you want to provide all the information to users, it is important to follow the rule of more clicks and less thinking. Providing the information all at once instead of through layers of menus will overwhelm the user. Building a mobile version the allows for information digging won't annoy the user because finding the information easily is more important than limiting the number of menu layers.

Summary

Remember to do your research and look at your analytics before spending money on a mobile site. If your business goals center around providing this value, even if it's only 30% of your user group, knowing how they interact with the tool and what they want from it will help you to get it right the first time.

Photo by Jesper Sarnesjo