Clearly there are more and more people using mobile devices to visit websites. We’re seeing smart phones and tablets everywhere. And people are browsing the web on them.

So what are we to do with our website?

Search the web and you will find many articles and blogs that talk about why we need a mobile website, and just as many who talk about why we don’t need a mobile website.

Now we’re talking about a separate website for mobile devices than the one that you would have for regular browsing. That’s two website, right?

What does that actually mean? Well it means that a company will take your website, strip it down and build a new site on a sub-domain of your regular domain.

Whoooah … and how would that work? Well it means that you have your regular website, and if someone is browsing your regular website on a mobile device, it will be detected that this person is on a mobile device and the mobile website will be displayed. Sounds OK?

Sounds OK, but is it really OK. It depends on how you want to treat your customers and potential customers. Generally we take a lot of time to plan our websites and the content that we want to put on them. Painstakingly writing content to fit our market, talking about the things that matter to our customers and readers, selecting the right images to depict what we are saying, helping our customer to make buying decisions that will be the right ones for them … and more.

So do you really want to deliver a cut down version of your website to your customers?

Not me! No. My customer deserve to be able to see and read all the information I have created for them. They can pick and choose what they read, not chosen by someone who has decided to create a mobile website from a regular website. I’ve seen some of these mobile websites. I’ve seen pages been stripped down from over 500 words to less than 100.

We must remember that not everyone using a mobile device wants to see a stripped down website. There will be customers and potential customers who will choose not to have a regular computer at all. Many will choose just to have a tablet as their main internet connection. Does that mean that most of your customers will be missing out on most of the information on your website.

The nature of shopping is constantly changing. Many people browse websites to get information prior to purchasing, and many of them are browsing on mobile devices. Do you want to deliver only a fraction of your website to your potential customers? I think not!

So what is the solution?

Well as we know technology is constantly changing. We don’t know what the best way will be to deliver mobile websites in the future, but right now a Responsive Website is probably the best way to go.

What is a Responsive Website?

According to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design

Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones)

Isn’t this the way you would want to be heading with your website?