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Mobile Design for eCommerce Websites

Ron Halversen, VP of Sales for Clarity Ventures, explains different options for mobile web development

 

 

 

Video Transcript: Hi, Ron from Clarity. Today, we're going to talk about mobile development and what types of options are out there for you. So, when I joined Clarity a couple years ago and came and looked at our Google analytics, less than 2% of our visitors came to our website on the mobile device but just last week, I checked and we're up over 15%. And many of our clients, when we look at their analytics, were over 50%. So, like it or not, mobile is here to stay and we have to deal with it. So, every one of our clients come to us and say, "What mobile model is the best?" And my response back is, "Well, what is your budget and even more importantly than budget is, what do you want to do with that mobile model?" So, today we're going to talk briefly about the five different mobile models, we'll talk a little bit about pricing, we'll talk about the pros and cons, and see if we can help you pick a mobile model.

First off, let's start with mobile friendly. Mobile friendly is taking, and it's the thing we're all used to, it's taking a website and removing anything that would not display on a mobile device. So, we've removed Flash. We might optimize our icons a little bit so that our pictures and images are a little bit smaller, a little bit less resolution, so they load quickly. Other than that, it's the thing that all of us use when you see our iPhones, it'll be pinch and zoom, pinch and zoom. That's a mobile friendly website. So, as long as everything works, as long as everything displays and you can pinch and zoom, that's a mobile friendly website. So to finish off now, everything will display, we're all used to pinch and zoom. The great thing about this is it's a centralized administration so you'll only have one website to administer. Remember, you can't use Flash. The good thing about this is that if you have an email address or a phone number, the phone will automatically put that into an [inaudible 00:01:49] even if you forget to tag it. So, people can call you and people can email you from their mobile phone even if you haven't put an [inaudible 00:01:55] in there. The cost of this is really nothing. You just have to make sure you're not using Flash and you just have to make sure that it's optimized.

The second one would be a mobile template. Now, what is a mobile template? Now, this is not a full mobile website so there's a difference between the template and website. But the template would be, it's your standard website plus you've got some mobile user experience. So, we've got clients that come in, they've got users that work on pools, they service the pools. So, when they visit the website the service technician can come up and either, it'll pop up with a dialogue that says, "Oh! I know you're on a mobile device. So, do you want to log in or visit the website?" Then they click log in and it'll take them to a mobile experience but then, just provides a log in and then, a route and maybe, the addresses of all the houses that they have to visit. Other than that, the rest of the website is all the same. And so, we've only optimized a small subset of the website for the mobile experience. So, you get your website, you figure out what subset you need for a mobile experience. It's usually around specific functions that you want. The great thing still is it's still centrally administered, but the cost is only a little bit more because you're only doing a few page templates that are optimized for your mobile device.

The next one would be the mobile website. So, mobile website is designed, the entire website, all the page templates, specifically, for the mobile device. It's all tailored to guide a good mobile user experience. So, you could have separate templates, separate designs, separate pages, most importantly, separate navigation. Many times we get these big, huge, mega menus that have 200 or 300 links in them, very difficult to navigate on your mobile menus. So, the great thing about that is you can have a product specific website where you can have landing pages, micro sites, things like that, that are very specific to a mobile website. So here, mobile website, specifically designed around the mobile experience. In this particular case, it's a decentralized admin because you've got two separate websites. You've got a website for your standard devices and then, a website for this. So, there's definitely additional administration, an additional expense there, but you get complete control over the user experience. It usually means a separate URL, you may have separate template, separate design, separate experience navigation, but it costs more.

The next one is what we call mobile responsive. Right now, this is the most popular. It's usually the most cost effective, as well. What mobile responsive means that all of the devices, when it comes to the website, the website can dynamically tell what device resolution you're on and adjust itself automatically to the device. Now, that might be by removing pictures when it gets too small, when it starts getting down into maybe a vertical eye pad, it automatically changes the navigation from words across the top to a drop down. So, it dynamically adjusts, dynamically sizes graphics pictures, but it normally leaves the fonts alone. So, if you're normally used to reading a 10 point or a 12 point font, the fonts will stay usually 10 point, 12 point font. So, that means your forms, you could still click login, it's still very legible, the text will stack itself. We're used to scrolling up and down on our mobile devices, but the text is very legible, it makes a great user experience. The great thing about that is you're still centralized administration. You can have either a unique or common controls.

So, if your menu structure, if your navigation is very minimal, you don't even have to change the menu if it's like four words across the top, those four words will probably fit on an iPhone, you'd probably leave it alone. But, if it's more than that, you could actually have a unique navigation. You've probably seen this on your iPhone on a responsive site where it switches from words across the top to a drop down. You click a drop down and then, you scroll and it kind of rolls through and cycles through those.

The other great thing is that all of the content is consistent no matter what the device, all of the messaging, administration, everything else. Great thing is cost is very inexpensive. The only real cost here is when you remove your existing site to a responsive site. What ends up happening is we copy and paste a lot of the content from the old pages to the new pages. What ends up happening is the developers three, four, or five years ago had either inline styles, deprecated tables, HTML old code, that will break. Sometimes the third-party modules will have a fixed iFrame, or a f

 

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