Should your Business Website Go Mobile?

Small business owners – can your business websites be viewed properly on any smartphones? Do you have any plans to go mobile? If you answer no to both questions, you are losing out big opportunities out there in the fast-growing mobile market.

The opportunities are huge: There are nearly 500 million smartphones sold worldwide in 2011 – almost 60 percent growth from 2010 figures (source: Gartner.) Furthermore, there are over 700,000 apps, getting 30 billion app downloads in 2011 alone (source: IDC.) Those figures are simply stunning, and jumping into the mobile market bandwagon is a no-brainer decision for me.

Related: Taking Your Business Mobile: The Basics

Have you ever visited Noobpreneur.com from a smartphone or any other mobile devices? If so, you might have noticed that there’s a pop up message asking you whether you want to install our mobile app or not.

Noobpreneur mobile app is currently a simple app from which you can read updates from Noobpreneur.com and our social media accounts, as well as getting the latest business news. The future plan is for the app to serve more than just blog posts and articles, namely exclusive deals and freebies for mobile users, and many more ideas.

I currently partner with Conduit Mobile, a free and easy to use tool for building a mobile application for your business website. The tool, in my opinion, is powerful, allowing you to add almost any features you can think of in an app: Adding your blog or any news feeds, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, contact info, videos, pictures, and many more – and of course, you can customize the front end design of your app.

One of the reasons why I go mobile with Noobpreneur.com is to offer better accessibility for smartphone owners who like to surf the Net via their smartphones, as well as making sure that Noobpreneur.com can be found via a smartphone.

That being said, I strongly recommend for you to go mobile, as there will be a bigger percentage of your site visitors who visit your website via their smartphones, not from a desktop or laptop.

Businesses planning to go mobile: Here are some tips for you

Now, if you have decided that you will explore the mobile market more, there are some basics you need to grasp before you truly benefit from going mobile.

I recommend you to visit this MSN BusinessOnMain’s article written by Joanna L. Krotz – Taking Your Business Mobile: The Basics.

As the title implies, the article will give you the basics of going mobile with your business website, including tips on getting your website viewed right on any types of smartphones, as well as what kind of mobile applications your business should build.

It is a good read and it actually gives me an idea or two on how to better our mobile app. Here’s the article again:

Taking Your Business Mobile: The Basics

Ivan Widjaya
Go mobile

Disclaimer: I receive incentives to share my views on this particular blog post, but all of the opinions are my own. My blog is a part of an online influencer network for Business on Main.