A good article was published earlier this month by Arnie Kuenn  at marketing land.com entitled “It’s 2014, Is Your Content Mobile Ready?”[1]

The point he makes is not new, but it is growing more important.   The fact is, desktop computers are not the only way people view websites.   20 percent of all website views are now done on tablets or smartphones and that percentage is increasing.

The truth of the matter is, the vast majority of sites look terrible when viewed on a tablet or smartphone.   They are hard to navigate, hard to read and drive people away from your site.   You cannot afford to ignore mobile users anymore.

With today’s tools it’s not that hard to build websites that work across platforms.  Responsive web design is a technique that uses existing web tools to build websites that respond to different devices and displays content in a format that works for that device.

Take a look at this website on your laptop/desktop and then on your smartphone.  The content is the same, but the layout varies to work better on your device you are using.

The drawback for responsive design is that you have to watch page load times.   A slow page load time negatively affects your users engagement and your SEO work.   So you need to keep pages short and limit graphics that show on  the mobile site.

In some cases, a Mobile App makes a lot of sense.  Mobile Apps require more time to build, but with tools like livecode  [2] it is no longer a monster task to build apps that run on many platforms.   My rule of thumb is if it’s just text, stick with a responsive designed website.  It you have interaction, like ordering a item, then an app makes sense.

Another interesting observation that Kuenn makes is that half of all mobile traffic is online video.  To make video work across all the platform you have to avoid using flash.  Instead use CSS and HTML 5 to provide a quality video experience for all visitors regardless of the platform they use.

The way the internet is used and viewed continues to change and your use of it must change to be responsive to changing nature of your visitors.

[1] Healthcare.gov website ‘didn’t have a chance in hell’,  Patrick Thibodeau, October 21, 2013, ComputerWorld, Click here for the article.

[2] Livecode is a programing environment that enables you to create cross platform apps from one programming file. Their shareware version is quite good. Click here for the livecode.com site.