Internet usage on mobile devices has risen significantly and will continue to rise as data plans and mobile phones become cheaper. Most importantly, people are beginning to make purchases from e-commerce sites using their mobiles rather than their computers. Even offline companies are witnessing an increase in offline business sales activities. For this reason, many businesses have realized the significance of mobile websites for increasing business sales. Businesses have the option of either developing an interactive/responsive site or creating a separate website for mobile devices.

Options for Developing Mobile Websites

An array of options is available for creating a separate mobile website that comes complete with its own separate URLs. You can develop a separate mobile website in place of your main online site to allow easy access to mobile users when they want to access your online page. One can even create a mobile website that is smaller as well as a mirror image of the original site.

Mobile websites are usually built in two main ways. The first method is that the mobile website contains the same content as the current site. The second method is to create a site that contains different content. Before creating the content, you need to decide on the purpose that the mobile website will be serving for your business. This can be determined by analyzing the activity of the mobile users visiting your existing site. Many businesses make alterations in their mobile websites to meet different and diverse browsing habits and queries of various search engines. But similar content for mobile and main sites is perfect for those businesses that want to save time and cost on regularly updating the mobile edition of their sites.

Creating a Responsive Website for Mobiles

A mobile website with similar content like the primary online site needs to be “responsive” in nature. A responsive mobile website offers the following advantages:

– With a responsive site, the need for separately updating the primary and mobile websites does not arise.

– An interactive and responsive design allows for using one type of content for both the mobile and primary sites. This allows easy and better editing of content for both the mobile and main site.

– This kind of design allows the use of links that will direct users to both the existing as well as the mobile site.

– The pages that are most frequented by users should be identified and made responsive, which can spread to other pages, too.

For building a separate but similar mobile website, the same URLs are usually used for these sites. In such cases, servers send out the mobile edition of the website to mobile users. In this way, businesses do not have to tackle problems like broken URLs that can delay the implementation of a responsive site.

Benefits of a Separate Mobile Website

A separate mobile website, on the other hand, allows for the creation of different content for mobile users. Separate mobile websites come with the following benefits:

– The mobile website can be totally different by catering to the specific needs of mobile users.

– The mobile website can also be the same by just making slight changes with regards to search engine friendly keywords.

– By creating a separate mobile site, the current site does not require redesigning.

– A separate mobile website allows for the experimentation of new ideas which can be incorporated later into the primary website.

Despite the many advantages of separate mobile websites, many businesses prefer to develop responsive sites. Yet, separate mobile websites can be easier to design and can transform into highly responsive websites.