Beware of the sales patter insisting your business needs an 'app'

Ian Kimber, Technical Director at Rochdale Online

Most businesses and organisations have websites, and with the popularity and proliferation of all sizes of mobile devices, a mobile strategy for those websites is more important than ever. If you haven't already begun to make those decisions about your own organisation's mobile website presence, the time is now.

At Rochdale Online we talk to a lot of local businesses and awareness is growing, however, for the uninitiated there are a bewildering array of options and some have been seduced by slick sales patter persuading them they must have an 'app'.

However, an app has to be downloaded to be used and most people don't want to install an app just to get static information - which covers the vast majority of business websites.

Apps are device specific and must be uniquely designed for Android, iOS, Blackberry Mobile, and Windows Phone 8 (e.g. an app developed for an iPhone will not work on an Android phone) and hence present compatibility concerns for businesses that don’t want to segment their user base.

Apps also make frequent updates painful and expensive. First, application updates need to be done by the developer, which of course is costly. Secondly, apps must go through the same lengthy approval process in the App Store. Next, native applications require consumers to manually download the updates before they can be used.

Apps are closed environments and cannot be crawled by search engines - they won’t impact your organic search ranking.

So what is the solution?

Ian Kimber, Rochdale Online Technical Director, answers: "A responsive* website layout ensures that anyone visiting your site via tablets and smartphones, as well as desktop browsers will have a good user experience. It's the simplest way to reach users across a range of different devices, including those not yet 'in the field'.

"The Rochdale Online website is currently being re-developed as a responsive layout."

Building a responsive site is less expensive and separate code bases don't have to be maintained. The look-and-feel and the user experience is consistent across platforms, and any form factor will deliver a good experience.

With a responsive website, the whole site can be managed via a CMS (Content Management System), so there is no need for (expensive) manual intervention from developers to make changes or launch pages or frustrating approval processes to be endured.

If you want to appeal to everyone across multiple platforms and devices, responsive is the answer. It’s faster and easier to get your information across, and it’s fairly straightforward to build a mobile-specific menu that gives mobile users what they need.

* To view how a responsive layout works you can use the Google Chrome web browser on a desktop/laptop to emulate how the design responds to changes in screen size to typical tablet and mobile sizes. For example, type www.adamsons-estates.co.uk into the Chrome Browser with the window maximised. Now start to slowly reduce the size of the browser window by dragging from a corner and see how the content adapts as the browser size reduces.

Alternatively (and if you don't have Google Chrome web browser), visit www.adamsons-estates.co.uk on your desktop/laptop and the same site on your mobile phone and note the difference in layout yet all the same content is still accessible.