Startup Freak Community for entrepreneurs and small businesses
In our previous article, we highlighted the importance of having a mobile friendly website and what is the importance. We would suggest you read the article before reading further Get Responsive Website to make your website Mobile Friendly. Concept of Responsiveness makes single website look different on different screens, whereas mobile website concept makes different websites for desktop and mobile. After reading you may be wondering now if making your website responsive, saves you big bucks and very easy, then why would you be interested in a separate mobile website.
To answer that i did some research, really why would people go for all that extra work, and what i found was that it is a viable way to create a separate website if you have lot of data on your website. Imagine mobile connectivity is most of the times worst than the dial up connection and user will not be able to download your website. In case you want to showcase only limited stuff to your mobile user and not all the things that is there on your website then having a separate mobile website is the option.
What is Mobile Website
Just like any other normal website you find a host provider and a domain name and then host your website on a server, in the same way mobile website is built with its own server space allocated, you can use same server which you are using for your desktop website or a different one. And Charging is also done in the same way, i.e., hosting charges which is some where from $5-$10 per year for hosting space varying from 1GB to 5 GB. You have to get the design and layout done separately, SEO, analytics, URl, everything will be separate, its like have a different website altogether. Ex: Times of India has a mobile website at http://m.timesofindia.com/
How to get Mobile Website
You can either get it done through a web designing company or you can do it yourself as there are many service providers available today and you can in a matter of seconds create your mobile website with the online tools they provide. They automatically converts the url into a mobile website, optimized for any mobile operating system or browser.You will just have to paste your desktop website url and in few seconds they give you a mobile version, you can edit the layout and color and everything online itself. And the final step will be to link your desktop and mobile website which you can officially link by copying the “redirection script” from the dashboard and paste in to your existing site, so mobile users who type the URL will be sent to the mobile version.
But Instead of using auto conversion tool to convert website to mobile format, i think its better to use tool that give users better control over what can be done. Afterall, conversions are’nt really accurate most of the time.
I prefer those that allow a semi-automated conversion. I guess the competition in this industry is getting really fierce with more and more companies coming out with better features.
A list of some of the service provider
- Morces – Giving users more control to grab content from existing sites, sync content in a simplistic manner. Support is good. Free too.
- Mobify – High tech technology that allows users to sync content at a very accurate rate. However, if too much modification is made to the desktop site, the mobile site get haywire. Probably giving users the option to manually sync will be better
- Mofuse – Simple way to put business on mobile by drag and drop. A bit costly.
- Dubamobile – Greatly promoted by Google (one year free hosting) . It’s like bmobilized – auto conversion. But that limits the users control. Conversion are not 100% accurate.
- bmobilized – Auto Conversion 7days free trails
- MobileGo – Indian service provider which i found. Its not automated but they charge less 2000 per year.
One Advantage of having mobile website is also that Google indexes mobile content differently. You get better ranking as this segment is still in its early stage. So if you want to enter mobile market before your competitor, this will be ideal.
Hope this article was useful, if you have a better service provider in mind plz share it in your comments, as it will be helpful to others too.
