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Is your website mobile? Why should my website be available on mobile phones you say? You can’t ignore mobile, even if you think that your customers aren’t using it. And it’s not even just mobile, but you also have to consider other devices people are searching on such as ipads and tablets. According to this article on Smartinsights, a small business marketing website, tablet and smartphone usage nearly doubled in the last year based on a study of 500 million visits tracked. Research, and personal experience, is showing that mobile devices are still ahead of the game for being used as a research and browsing platform. The bottom line is if your website is not optimized for mobile, table or otherwise, you may be missing out on those who are searching for your product or services. For those websites that are e-commerce related, this translates into dollars and sense. Thus, it makes TOTAL SENSE for you to make sure that your website can be browsed on mobile.

Another thing you have to think about is email marketing. Smart phone users are checking more email from their phone, if your email consists of links back to your website and they visit the site and its broken, what does that say about your business? It doesn’t matter if you’re a family owned farm celebrating its 75th anniversary or a business that just opened its doors, mobile already influences the lives of your customers and will gain more influence in the years to come. So what do you have to do to make sure your site is mobile friendly? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Simplify Your Design
Pull up your website on a smartphone and take note of the design changes needed. Does your site require larger font sizes? How about critical information placed above the fold? You’ll go a long way providing big, touchable buttons for navigation on your mobile website design.

2. Use Responsive Design
Responsive design is a more affordable solution that uses CSS style sheets. CSS style sheets created for mobile will auto adjust the display of the website properly on most mobile phones and devices. Check out the Boston Globe website on your phone. Responsive design will allow your website to adjust no matter the size of your screen.

3. Adaptive Design
Adaptive Design will be the more expensive solution to your website. Adaptive solutions detect automatically what type of browser you’re using and generates a page matched to the device capabilities.

Your website needs to be considered a long term investment into your business. With the speed at which technology is changing these days you must make a commitment to be forward thinking about updating the platform of your website along with the rest of your customers. This is the name of the game in small business, don’t get behind! Contact Severity Design for a free, no obligation website evaluation to see if you need to go mobile or what it would take to get your mobilized on smartphones and tablets!