Your mobile choice
It's a question of taste as it relies on the way you prioritize your content distribution goals. Think about it: what would you like your mobile viewers to see? And, while you're at it, please also find out : do your online prospects search on mobile? According to a 2011 statistics, published on mobthinking.com, there are more than 1.2 billion mobile Web users in the world and their numbers are on the rise this year. So, the answer to the second question is quite predictable : yes, your customers will search your services through mobile, that is, if they're not already doing so.
What type of content are you offering and which design is best suited to provide this information are questions still to be answered. Maybe as fast as going through this article.
As choosing between two popular flavors or between two valuable candidates, your mobile site's design has benefits and drawbacks at both ends. The web is filled with stories and arguments on building a responsive website or creating a dedicated mobile site .
The differences are described eloquently by Smashing magazine writer Brad Frost, who used the two US presidential mobile campaigns ran by Romney and Obama this year. VR interactive also hosted a virtual battle considering Bing's suggestions for using one or the other. Leaving aside the stories behind the using of dedicated mobile sites over responsive websites or vice-verse, here are the most important pro's and con's we've found:
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PRO's |
CON's |
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Responsive |
uses the same URL as the website – lets users find it quickly; reduces the bandwidth that the crawlers consume |
information may be loaded less rapidly then dedicated |
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more ranking signals may come to this URL as search engines prefer this type of site |
pages may be too long |
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less work building the mobile site, can result in cheaper updating and maintaining |
search engines optimized requirements may differ from desktop to mobile |
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makes content management easier as there is no need for duplicating content |
displays the same content for all screens, not letting developers personalize content depending on mobile user profile |
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Dedicated |
enables easy and fast user access to information ( time of access, user interface and applications) uses a separate URL for each device used to access the information |
may not attract as many overall viewers
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lets users see personalized information, created specifically for mobile; easy optimization of design |
may lack parts of important information presented on the website |
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Prioritizing information upon user relevance |
not search engine friendly; Bing advices against it |
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Makes a clear difference between the desktop users and the mobile prospects, as they may not be the same targeted audience |
may turn out to be more expensive to load, update and maintain |
And the conclusion? It really depends on what type of online business you are conducting: if you need to build a new website from scratch, a responsive website would be less expensive for example, while a dedicated mobile site would come perfect as an add on to a functional site, looking to broaden its audience on mobile.
With Jentla Marketing Hub, you will be using a dedicated mobile website, with all the advantages presented above. And the extra options that may win the con's:
- any website content can be automatically published to mobile also, directly from the article editing page
- users can set meta data to any JMH article, enabling search engines to find it quickly
- the maintenance and updates of mobile site are included from Jentla basic version up.
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