In a small town, you might think everyone already knows about your business or your well-known tourism attraction. You might think you don’t need a website at all, or that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website.
You’d be wrong. You have new residents, people who have never needed your service before, visitors, and tourists. They don’t know about you, and they are highly likely to search for you using their phone.
- During 2011, mobile access to the Internet doubled.
- 61% of smartphone users search for local information on the go.
And I’m willing to bet that your website isn’t ready for this, because analysis conducted by BIA/Kelsey said that:
- “93.3% of SMB websites are not mobile-compatible and will not render successfully on mobile devices or smartphones.”
What’s the easiest way to get a mobile friendly website for a small town business? Build your site using a tool that is mobile-friendly.
Two Do-It-Yourself Choices
My liquor store site is built on Blogger, and it is automatically mobile friendly. Posterous Spaces is also easy to use and automatically is mobile friendly. You can build your own site without additional technical help on these services.
One With-Help Choice
If you are ready to pay for website support, you can use WordPress. It’s very powerful, and can be customized to be mobile friendly. However, for the majority of small business owners in small towns, it’s too much to take on alone.
- About the Author
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
Assuming that you do not use a custom theme for WordPress, then using WPTouch makes it very simple to implement a mobile-friendly site.
I, naturally, did not go down this path, so after much Googling, I discovered that if you set the width parameters to percentages rather than absolute numbers (e.g. 95% vs. 600px), then you can pretty much accomplish the same thing. My site isn’t perfect in mobile, but it gets the job done.
Thanks for adding that tip, Jason.
Hi Becky, As Jason mentioned, WordPress may be “getting the job done” and we love wordpress. If you’d accept, we could offer a 50% discount to your community businesses who really want to “Git er Done!” We’re from a small town in Montana, so we know value. Great service, done quick, done right and done quickly. http://BloomMobile.net mention SBSurvival-half-off.
Eric James
Director of Marketing
Bloom Digital Media, Inc.
Bozeman, Montana
Eric, because you’re from a small town and you were so polite, I’ll let that ad stay. : )