Last year we wrote about ‘the mobile future’. Well that future has become the present. As a business owner, what are your options for entering the ever-growing mobile market?

In the US, smartphones outnumber feature phones. In India, this year mobile web users will outnumber desktop web users.

Not only is the mobile market growing but it’s becoming more profitable. Google recently added in-app subscriptions to the Play Store, PayPal is taking mobile to the high street and banks are getting in on the act led by Barclays Pingit.

Fears of security have been swept aside as mobile users worldwide devour information & entertainment on the go.

The opportunities for marketing are huge. Last year the mobile market was estimated to be worth $25-50 billion by 2015, but as China’s app market is valued at $35 billion those early figures massively undersell the mobile market.

The Great Mobile Choice

Swiftly putting telesales & SMS marketing to one side, there are four ways to make your business mobile. Depending on the size of your business you may wish to pick one, go for all of them or a use a selection based on your business aims and potential mobile revenue.

Users can access content on their smartphone or tablet in two ways – via a browser or by downloading an app. You should be making sure that potential customers can access your content via one of these options:

• Browser – Websites (desktop, mobile & responsive) and Web Apps
• Application – Native Apps

So which one should you choose? Use our helpful guide to decide!

Mobile Web Design

The most common option for mobile marketing is a mobile version of your website. This is a completely separate version of your website that users are redirected to when they access your site via a mobile or tablet. Usually, mobile sites add a prefix or suffix to the domain ie. m.site.com, site.com/m

The main advantage of a creating a mobile version of your website is the ability to design a site that is perfect for mobile and tablet viewing. Find out what makes a good mobile website with our mobile web design top tips, or go a step further and learn how to do it yourself with our range of mobile courses.

Why should you design a whole new website?

When designing a site for desktop users, you are considering how it will function on a large monitor with a keyboard and mouse. You can get away with a lot of text, and the main thing you want people to do is click. It’s also easy for visitors to type on their keyboard. It’s actually really hard to click on most buttons on the web when using a mobile or smartphone as our thumbs are much bigger than a mouse pointer. Few sites render fully on a mobile screen with text large enough to read so users must zoom in to read or click.

A mobile optimised site allows you to get round these problems by specifically optimising your site for small screens and large thumbs. For more info, download our free mobile web design checklist.

If you are unfamiliar with HTML & CSS you can still learn how to design mobile websites with Dreamweaver & jQuery. If you do have experience designing sites and want to learn what makes a mobile site different then our mobile web design week will show you the best practice approach to designing mobile optimised websites.

Recently some problems have arisen with mobile website with duplicate content issues. Search engines do not like ranking two pages with the same content – which is likely to happen if you have a mobile version of your site. At the moment this is a minor issue and we will be writing a post detailing how to avoid this in future. If it is something you are really worried about, then you might want to have a read about responsive web design…

Responsive Web Design

If you don’t want two versions of your website then the perfect solution is responsive web design. A responsive website is a single site that renders differently on various screen sizes – another advantage over a mobile website which you would need to test on a wide range of devices.

The great advantage of a responsive site is that it doesn’t just address the issue of viewing a site on a PC or a phone – if only it were that easy! In 2012, people are viewing the internet on 50″ TVs, 20″ monitors, 15″ laptops, 10″ netbooks, 7″ tablets, 3″ smartphones, 2″ watches and every size between. Then consider the huge difference in widths & heights, whether the screen is landscape or portrait and screen resolution.

All of this adds up to a development nightmare – but don’t worry, responsive web design is here to save you! Using the latest HTML5 & CSS3 design practices you can create sites that render perfectly on screens of all shapes and sizes and work as well with a mouse & keyboard as they do with a finger, thumb or hand.

Common responsive web design techniques include resizing text depending on screen size, resizing tables & images and realigning horizontal elements vertically.

Come on our mobile web design week workshop and we will teach you all the skills required to develop a responsive website using HTML5, CSS3 & JavaScript. If you are already coding using the latest standards and want to start building responsive sites then our stand alone responsive web design course will give you and overview of the best practice.

Responsive web design is the ideal solution for creating a website for all screen sizes. However, this can be very complex for large sites with a lot of elements. Most responsive sites are simple at the moment but we look forward to seeing where this expanding field is heading.

Native App Development

Apps are more complex than websites and require programming build. There are two types of app: native app & web app. A native app is one that you download to your device and access at any time. A web app is accessed through a browser on a device. These apps often look and function the same:

Sometimes, a website is not the best solution, or businesses want an alternative for when potential customers can’t access the web. Apps are great for customer engagement – you can offer a more in depth experience than a mobile website.

Engagement is key when it comes to apps; recent figures show that more users access the web via apps than browsers on mobile devices. The buzzword ‘app’ has become so popular that both Windows and Apple now call desktop software apps.

It is hard to make money from native apps but if you manage it then you are in a great position as you have managed to place your content directly on a potential customer’s device! You can charge for the app itself, for content within the app or even a subscription with Google Play – making this the most monetised field of mobile marketing. Both Apple and Google currently receive 15% of app sales from their marketplaces.

We run an iOS App Developer Course and an Android App Workshop, teaching you how to design, develop and market apps for the two most popular mobile operating systems – with a combined market share of 82% between them!

Web App Development

Web app development is an increasingly popular field of mobile development. Unlike native apps which are downloaded to a device, web apps run in-browser.

Many mobile users are still unsure about privacy & security issues when downloading apps onto their phones and prefer to browse the web. Developing a web app means that you can provide users with the same content as a native app without them having to download anything.

Web apps are not covered by Apple & Google’s app store policies and they don’t receive any of your money, so this is an attractive prospect when developing apps. Many developers have also grown tired of trying to get make their apps visible in the app stores – a feat that is covered on our app courses.

Web apps can be unreliable and are hard to test. They rely on both phone & browser capability to function and many only work on the most up to date devices.

Conclusion: Which is best?

Hopefully now you have a better understanding of the different options available for mobile development. Deciding which is best for you is down to personal preference and the aims of your business.

We recommend that you always have a mobile friendly site – whether that is a separate site or a responsive main site. At the minimum, this allows your customers to easily access and browse your site from mobile devices.

If you want to offer a a different experience to your site then a mobile app is the way forward but as yet there is no clear winner between native and web apps.

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Tags

Android Apps, app development, iPhone Apps, Mobile, Mobile App Development, mobile websites, Responsive Web Design

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