I have talked a lot about being wary of emails promising to provide guaranteed SEO results, online marketing, and the like. I recently received an email from a client which read:
“I have a deal for you that you cannot pass up. I charge 500.00 for this and a 50.00 per month hosting and maintenance cost. I have been able to bring this down to an insane price for a few to test some things. This is cutting edge stuff.”
First off, the email is referring to creating a mobile website. This in itself is a good idea, and while $400 is a good price for a mobile site (and admittedly the quality of the mobile site demo they created was good), there is no reason I can think of for paying someone else to host it, or to pay a monthly maintenance cost since once a website is created there is only the ocassional tweak needed for content changes over time. What they are in fact offering is a hosted mobile site wherein you will be locked into their platform and will not actually own your mobile site, but just rent it.
The provider of the email went on to provide a mobile report link, which as one would expect provided statistics of mobile use, and how the clients current non-mobile site isn’t optimized for mobile. I’ve talked about the importance of having a mobile website presence, but my advice is not to get locked-in to a maintenance agreement unless there are no other options. An exception here would be using an online ecommerce option since these often provide additional benefits such as a secure server, SSL certificate, an easy to use administrative interface, no setup charge, and often no fee unless products are sold. This is a smart choice for someone just starting out with selling some goods, but not especially effective for a typical mobile website.
Ok, so if you already have an existing website that works well for your business, then my suggestion is to have “your own” mobile-only website created. What we do is utilize an htaccess file that targets mobile devices and redirects them to the mobile site directory wherein we provide them the option by a link to go back to the main website if they wish. This way one isn’t forced to view the mobile only version.
We recently created a mobile-only site for Four Seasons Painting which as intended is a simplified version of their existing site. It is important to note that most mobile phone users (75% approx) will use the 240×320 Android Feature Phone in portrait view. Since this screen size is very narrow, most websites would need to have their content reduced considerably or you run the chance of losing your prospective clients with far too much text, and poor page load times do to limited bandwidth. That being said, we have provided a couple of images to illustrate how a simple mobile site can be created (one that you will own) that will not only match the general look of your primary website, but will be easy to navigate, and will utilize all of the lastest touch features of current mobile phone browser platforms.
