Why Every Business Needs a Mobile Website

At first glance, the statement that a business needs a mobile website sounds like a marketer’s ploy to get more of your hard earned money into their pockets. More than likely you either built a website yourself with hours of yours and your staff’s time, or you had one built for you and expended a considerable amount of capital doing so. You may have also invested in special features such as video, audio and music. Finally, you may have gone the next step to spend time and resources with consultants to determine how to get your website ranking in the search engines. If any of this is true, you may think that adding on an ‘extra’ website would be overkill.
Although that is an understandable sentiment, you may want to reconsider.

You have certainly noticed the number of people who are carrying smartphones and IPhones. If you haven’t noticed that, it is almost certain that you have seen the interest surrounding Apple’s IPad. And while they all have the ‘cool’ factor and ‘gadget’ factor, what makes them so intriguing to people is that they allow for internet access. In other words, a person can carry the palm of their hand a device that accesses the internet with many of the same features of a personal computer. Although this is not necessarily a new phenomenon, its widespread acceptance is. Both popular culture and broadcast media operate with the expectation that people either have these mobile devices or are in the process of obtaining one.
This makes for an interesting situation for small businesses. A business may have an existing website, but it (the website) was probably created based on the fact that buyers would be accessing it from their home computers. As a result, when potential customers access these sites from their mobile device, they find them difficult to navigate to find the information that they need quickly. And in an even more constraining situation, these ‘old’ websites typically do not display adequately on a mobile device.
Before business owners decide whether or not they will dismiss this idea of making their website visible on mobile devices, they should undergo a simple challenge: take a mobile device and access their own website to find out. If this is not something you have done, it is advisable.
As you access your website, you will need to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is visiting your site with intent to buy. Furthermore, you should probably think through what the experience would be like if you knew you were not going to be near a personal computer any time soon. If you take the challenge, the central question becomes whether it will be easy to buy from you.
If the process does not make it easy to 1) make a purchase, 2) get the information to find your location or 3) whether or not you have a certain item, then it is likely to be just as difficult for your customer. This challenge is not exact science; however, it is a very easy way to provide you and your staff with the information you need to make a good decision about whether your business needs a mobile website. Make sure you take this challenge today.