Reasons You Shouldn’t Build a Separate Mobile Website

Responsive Web Design is the way forward in 2013.

Over recent years as the mobile market has exploded exponentially, at some point or the other every company has asked if they should build a separate mobile website.

Unfortunately, many companies prematurely jumped on the bandwagon, building a separate website optimized for mobile devices during the early stages of mobile computing. Many companies believe people don’t use mobile websites like desktop websites, so you should create a separate website, right? Wrong because phones are getting very powerful, screen sizes are in creasing and so is the screen resolution so even users on handheld device want everything that's visible on desktop. Primarily the three major reasons why businesses should never consider a separate mobile version of website are:

• Increased Cost/Maintenance – A mobile specific website results in a whole new body of content, programming, SEO, and more to manage.
• SEO Nightmare – With separate URLs, one for the desktop website and one for the mobile website, the SEO authority of site quickly becomes diluted and site could get penalised for duplicate content by Google et al. Much has been discussed about SEO and Google in a separate article Why Google Loves Responsive Design
• Frustrating User Experience: When users on mobile devices share links from your mobile site with desktop users, the desktop user sees the small screen layout, tiny images and limited content that is optimized for the mobile experience and this issue has been discussed in a separate article here.

These are main reasons why you should not have a separate website for mobile devices, and not the reasons why any business shouldn’t pursue the opportunity that mobile media presents by virtue of exlosive growth in  recent years a trend which is only go northward for quite sometime to come.  It won’t be long before most users access the web via one of the many mobile device platforms, instead of a desktop. So how do we propose you start your mobile marketing efforts without a mobile website?

Solution is pretty simple, really: (re)design your main website using responsive web design.

Feeling Responsive?

We’d love to hear your take on this new and exciting technology. If you are curious about how we can help you out to migrate your website to a new design based on responsive web design, send us an email