Mobile – a major shift are you ready?

Mobile – a major shift are you ready?

Websites are a great way of reaching out to existing and new church members.  They can explain why you are a Christian and what the Christian life means to you.  However research shows that you need to be on mobile devices if you want to reach out the whole internet audience because everyone is going mobile!

2014 – The year of the mobile website

In 2014 a major shift began in the way users used the internet.  More and more people started to use iPads and mobile devices like phones to browse websites.  This means that by the end of 2015 more people will browse the web using a mobile device more than any other type of device.  So your website needs to be mobile ready.  Some companies will tell you that their template system is mobile ready but what they really mean is that you need two websites – one for mobile and one for the pc.  Whilst this is okay, in practise few people have time to keep two websites going – especially if they are run by volunteers.

Websites that work across all devices

Instead you should plan to make your website work with all forms of browser.  It should react or resize according to the screen that you are using.  This in turn means that you need to design each page with this in mind.  A great way to do this is to use tiles.  These are squares or rectangles that are akin to buttons.  They often have a picture and text on them and they lead to a page with information.  So you might have a tile with a picture of the summer club and when the visitor clicks on it taking them to a page all about the summer club.  This could include a booking form and perhaps a photo gallery.

By designing for mobile using tiles or similar techniques you make it easy for the site to resize and move elements around the page.  You can see this illustrated in the diagram.  Here a simple web page is changed around to fit depending on the device being used.  This is achieved by a method called media queries and careful planning of size.

Think mobile and be part of the next internet wave

When designing websites think of the target devices too.  This means using techniques and layouts like tiles to enable the easy resizing of pages.  This will mean that you’re ready for the next wave of the internet – the mobile browsers!