Rise of the Mobile
Super-charged cell phones, tablet computers, wearable electronics—the future moves at a frightening pace sometimes. It is tough to keep up with all of the new and ground-breaking strides in technology; and yet, if we wish to get our message out, we have no choice but to try and keep up as best we can.
The good news is that taking advantage of these new avenues is not as difficult as it might seem. Creating a mobile-friendly website is a great way to broaden the impact and reach of your organization's message.
Mobile Meets The Mission
Take The Bowery Mission—an organization that has been serving the homeless and hungry in New York City since 1879. Today, The Bowery Mission and their program, Kids With A Promise, are recognized as one of New York's most effective and results-oriented organizations. While The Bowery Mission has a redesigned website that serves them well, they also recognized the importance of thinking ahead, and wanted to take advantage of the growing mobile market.
The Bowery Mission wanted to have a mobile website that was professionally designed, served their needs and the needs of their constituents, and allowed their staff to easily manage and update the content. At the same time, the mobile website needed to be built so that new features could be added rapidly, as future ideas and technology come to light.
Five Q partnered with The Bowery Mission to create a mobile-optimized version of their primary website, with a strategically chosen sub-set of functionality including audio, video, news highlights, and the ability to make online donations securely from a mobile device.
Once the mobile website was created, Five Q also implemented a robust mobile-to-desktop redirect application. The system uses a detection script that knows the browser device, and routes the website visitor to mobile URLs (when applicable), even if they clicked on a desktop link from an external location such as email, Google search results pages, or other linking websites.
Additionally, by simply adding a both mobile URL and desktop URL to each version of the website, visitors could now control the version of the site that they wanted to view.
Worth the Effort
For The Bowery Mission, the time and talent needed for this project were well worth the effort. The mobile website has increased the overall traffic to The Bowery Mission website by almost 20%, and has been viewed by users of almost all of the major mobile operating systems (i.e., smartphones, tablets, and more).
A mobile website may not be for every organization, but you should definitely consider developing a mobile strategy even if you don't have an immediate need. Whether that results in a mobile version of your website, a special mobile app, or just making sure that your website works properly on the most common mobile platforms, it is worth the time to give it some thought.