Often times I think the mobile version of a website gets less attention then it should. There are some times that your mobile site may be even more important than your regular version.

Story About a Sticker

Last Sunday night, just before I went to bad, I was thinking about my car. The inspection sticker was due to expire at the end of this month. There are several garages in town (that’s Lincoln, Maine for me) that offer this service. While brushing my teeth, I picked up my phone and went to the website of one of the garages that I have used before.

I was greeted with a mobile version of their site. At first I was thinking, yeah this is great. I started clicking around, looking for hours of operation. My thought was, hopefully they open early, and I can get in and out before I need to get to work. Here at Sephone, most of us start our day at 8am. So if they opened early enough, I could get in and out before it was time to start work.

As I navigated around the mobile website, I could not find their hours. I could read company history, phone number, services they offered, etc, but no hours. I tried to get out of the mobile website and get back to the regular full website. No dice, I was constantly redirected to the mobile version.  I knew that they had hours on their normal website, as I had seen it before.

Long story short, I had to get my laptop to get the hours, I showed up just when they opened and they got me in and out. Even though they still won my business, maybe they would not have with another customer having a similar experience.

So what is the moral of the story

So what is the point of this tale?  The point is don’t think of mobile as an after thought. In fact, I almost think it’s better to not have a mobile site than to have a bad one. Many phones will work okay on a decent site. If you are considering doing one, please do it right. There are numerous sayings and proverbs, such “good big or go home”, “Much good work is lost for the lack of a little more”, “The difference between try and triumph is a little umph”, “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right” that really drive home this point.