One of the few things that Google, Microsoft, Apple and just about every other major tech company in the world have in common is the belief that the world is going mobile.
The numbers are fairly staggering. Research firm Gartner expects the number of smartphones worldwide to triple by 2014, reaching some 850 million units. Tablet computers, such as the wildly popular iPad, are expected to fly off the shelves even faster, with sales growing sevenfold in the next two years.
Put simply, consumers are going small. And that means small businesses, like the tech giants, need to figure out how to reach the new mobile demographic.
“If you're in business and you're not already either actively moving forward with a mobile web initiative or making plans to do so, you won't be in business for long,” says independent tech analyst Carmi Levy. “Today's mobile websites and smartphone apps represent the new front lines of how and where consumers reach out – and how companies reach right back.”
The bad news for small and medium-sized businesses is that this shift demands an entirely different way of thinking about web presence. Tablets and smartphones have different screen sizes, processors and capabilities than desktop computers. A user who tries to access a traditional website on a four-inch screen can quickly be turned off by the laborious process of scrolling in all directions just to read something that was optimized for a desktop monitor.
That's why, when it comes to mobile websites, less is often better. In addition to smaller screen real estate, mobile users also tend to have more expensive data plans, and don't want to waste a lot of bandwidth waiting for a snazzy but wholly unnecessary Flash animation intro to load.
The good news is that, because mobile sites tend to be fairly stripped down, building one isn't usually as expensive or time-consuming as building a full website from scratch. Some big companies have spent millions on high-end applications for the iPhone or BlackBerry, but a bare-bones mobile site doesn't have to cost nearly as much.
The first step, Levy says, is to register a domain name similar to the business's current website – so, for example, http://www.johndoeplumbing.com would register m.johndoeplumbing.com, “m.” being the standard prefix for mobile websites. (Some businesses have opted to use the .mobi Internet suffix for their mobile sites, but the “m.” prefix has proven more popular in recent years, perhaps because it requires less typing.) In many cases, websites can be programmed to automatically redirect mobile users who access it from a mobile device over to the mobile website.
Once the domain name is secured, it's often possible to work with the same developers who built the original website to design a no-frills mobile version. “One of the joys of designing for the mobile web is that it's a much simpler process than it is for traditional websites,” says Levy. “So the total size, complexity and cost of going mobile can be fairly contained.”
SMART NUMBERS: Mobile devices are poised to take over the market
50: Percentage of handsets sold in the U.S. that will be smartphones by 2012.
15 billion: Mobile application store revenues in 2011 in the U.S. (Source: Gartner)
54.8 million: Number of tablet computers expected to be sold in 2011 - triple last year's number. (Source: Gartner)
This story first appeared in the June, 2011 issue of Report on Small Business magazine.
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