Mobile site choices | One site for all, or mobile website

There are three options open to website owners:

[1] Do nothing and hope:

Hope that your existing website, or the new site, will be able to present well on the numerous mobile devices (each with very different ways of interpreting style information and it must be said, many are very maverick at this) AND able to display well on desktops and laptops.

Also a lot of mobile phones do not have a pointing device (mouse) which makes sideways scrolling very difficult or impossible.

So potentially you could be excluding a high percentage of potential customers from your website, which obviously does not make good business sense.

[2] Have a one website policy:

Boundary Products Web Design has done extensive testing on actual mobile devices (not just evaluators) and the conclusion we have come to is to have a one site strategy with sleek coding, punchy text and not having an endless number of images.

Many mobile devices will still be able to view and use the site, and desktop users will not be disappointed with the presentation either.

We will design and build you a site that can tap into the desktop AND mobile market to maximize the number of potential customers because it would be safe for all users, apart from very old mobiles. As the majority of mobile users upgrade their devices regularly this would not be a problem.

Our pages give excellent results on many devices – please ask for a test result report and we will email it to you.

The advantage of a one site strategy is that it is a LOT easier to keep it up to date with information and images.

[3] Have a separate specialized mobile website alongside the conventional site:

We at Boundary Products Web Design can design and build you a specialized mobile site with the mobile specific ‘dot mobi’ domain name, which would be very lean on scripts (ie Javascript), images and text.

There is an additional logistical burden with this two site strategy. The problem is actually in the administration of having two sites which sounds okay in theory, but in practice in a busy office, only one website may get updated and it becomes time consuming to check one site with the other.

Large website pages:

We design and build websites so that they don’t disintegrate when they are forced to display within a small area. Many websites actually do fall apart, or the user ends up with a blank screen.

The touch screen mobiles, and bigger screened devices are more forgiving when it comes to displaying a large area, but they can fail badly on certain elements like navigation and rich media content.