Is your site ready for a mobile population?

You check your email on the fly. You check Facebook on your phone. You might even check in at your favorite restaurant on Foursquare on your iPhone. However, viewing websites on the small-screen has historically been a painful process. Despite this, a recent study conducted by Google and Mobile Marketing Association found some rather interesting facts related to mobile Internet usage. E-marketer.com sums it up quite succinctly:

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In the US, the survey found, 58% of smartphone owners had used their phone to go online every day during the week before polling, vs. 78 percent who said the same of their PC.
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This means that 78 percent of the prospects who are looking at your website on their desktop also want to look at your website on their mobile phone. But, is your website ready?

If you don’t have a mobile site already, you could be losing prospects fast.

Take a look at this e-Marketer.com snippet as an example. As you can see on the desktop version, there is a lot of clutter. Ads, headers, a long navigation menu at the top, and an article that takes less than 50% of the screen space; imagine looking at this on a 4.5×2.3 inch screen, talk about a headache!

Now look at the same article as viewed on their mobile site. There are little-to-no distractions, it’s all meat and material displayed in a manner that’ easy for people to read on the go. If they tried to pack the full site onto the little screen, readers would never come back and they would see little to no mobile traffic.

If you want prospects to view your site on the fly, consider a mobile site at the least, or even consider an RSS feed or mobile application.