Cell Phone Browsers and Your Site

Original Article from IntelliSites, the smart choice for Albany Web Design (and Albany SEO)



Remember the old days when you needed a computer to use the internet?

There's no denying what a big splash smartphones are making on the internet scene these days. Check out this recent article by Sarah Kessler, which references some new crazy stats about how big a role smartphones are playing in e-commerce and commerce in general. The article states that 30% of those surveyed used smartphones to look up product information or find the locations of stores and 11% actually made purchases on their smartphones during the holiday season. And, maybe most importantly, Kessler mentioned that the study indicated a correlation between how satisfied shoppers were with a company's mobile experience and how likely they were to make a purchase with that company.

In other words, people are taking this whole smartphone/shopping thing seriously.

How To Keep Up

If people are going to be making decisions about where to spend their money using their smartphones, then your company's website needs to be prepared for mobile visitors.

Of course, different businesses are going to need to take different steps to make themselves mobile friendly. You'll need to sit down with your web designer and have a chat about what kind of business you run and who your targets are. From there, you two can put your heads together and decide whether you're the kind of business that needs to make smartphone users generally happy or the kind of business that needs to make smartphone users jump for joy.

If you're going to get some smartphone visitors but not many, then making those visitors generally happy should be plenty. Your web designer will just need to make sure that your website shows up nicely on their phones, and you'll be good to go.

But if smartphone visitors are going to start taking over your site in the near future, you want to go all out for those folks. There's a difference between a site that can show up on a phone and a site that was designed for a phone. So if a good portion of your website visitors will be using smartphones to get there, you're going to need your web designer to make an alternate version of your site that is simplified and easy for mobile users to navigate in order to drive conversions. After all, those cell phone users are working with a small touch screen, so providing big buttons and easy ways to get to the important stuff on your site will really help them out.  And if you really want them to love you, you can even incorporate digital coupons and other promotions just for smartphone users into your site.

Smartphones are hip and here to stay. And if you want their users to say the same thing about your business, make sure your web design team gets your website into shape.