Hopefully you already understand the importance of having a mobile website. It’s not an option anymore. Some of our clients get as much as 40% of their entire website traffic from a mobile device. According to Google and other online experts, that number is going to continue to increase.
So you need a mobile website. In the last couple of years the term “responsive design” has come on strong. This means your website adapts in response to the device it is being viewed on. So if you have a tablet that’s 10 inches wide, the site conforms down to 10 inches. If you’re looking at it on a mobile phone, the site responds by decreasing in size to your phone’s screen. This allows the website owner to make just one site that is viewable on many devices. Be warned though, it’s not a perfect solution.
Your customers are very impatient. As a whole we consider load times of under 4 seconds to be our goal with all mobile websites. Remember, that while you might have the latest and greatest Iphone 5s on a high speed network, your customers may very well be using prepaid older phones on slow networks. Even if they had the nicest phones, they don’t want to wait for your website to load. According to Trillibis (a mobile marketing firm) only 21% of responsive sites are loading in under 4 seconds.
According to the study, the slow load times were due to the image-heavy nature of the websites. Responsive websites are generally serving up the same content regardless of device. While it might respond differently on your mobile phone from a layout perspective, the site is still trying to serve up the same images as the desktop version. With that in mind have you optimized all of your online images for ideal load times? Or are your images and graphics still gigantic?
Furthermore, if you’re a casino or gaming property do your mobile users want the same experience on their mobile device as they do on their desktop? We prefer to let the analytics answer this question. We evaluate our clients’ needs based on what their customers are doing. By taking a look at their analytics account we can see what pages are most frequently viewed on mobile devices. Then we build a mobile site based on what mobile users are looking for. Think about what you do on your mobile device. Users tend to be looking for contact info, events happening that week and other immediate gratification items. Are you clogging up load times by trying to serve up ALL your content to users not wanting ALL your content? Responsive may not be for your casino. It works great for some businesses, but it’s not for everyone.
Let us tailor the perfect mobile solution for you. Contact us today.