Every business needs a website. An increasing number of people are using smartphones to view websites. But in many cases, websites do not work well, or at all, on smartphones. This is explained in more detail throughout our course How to earn $4000 a month as a part-time web developer which is included in Joomla Pro. Here's a quick overview:
Google has collated some statistics that were collected by reputable third parties (Gartner, Cisco etc.) and published them on a site called GoMo. If you didn't think this stuff was important, prepare to think again:
- By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online
- There will be one mobile device for every person on earth by 2015
- 71% of users expect a mobile site to load as fast as a desktop site
- 57% would not recommend a business with a bad mobile site
- 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
- 50% of mobile searches lead to a purchase
- 23% of people have cursed at their phone when a site doesn't work!
Now okay, I do tend to think that you can make statistics say anything, but there is a definite trend here and the opportunity is now.
(By the way, the Joomla Magazine includes an article that uses a similar argument in the March 2012 issue)
So how do you go about making your Joomla website mobile-friendly? Well if you are starting from scratch and you want to use an off-the-shelf template, there are several Joomla template developers that have the answer. Look around, but three that we use a lot are RocketTheme, YOOTheme and Joomlabamboo.
You could also create a stand-alone site that displays well on mobile devices. The downside of this is you have to change content on two sites – the main site and the mobile site.
Finally you can use an extension called Mobile Joomla. This is a great solution for new and existing sites as it simply formats the existing content so it looks good on various mobile devices.
The approach we take in our course is to create a stand-alone site, using Mobile Joomla. This is a fantastic approach for new developers because you don't need to convince a prospect that they need to change their existing website. Instead, you demonstrate the need for having a mobile-friendly site, build this with Joomla and include some simple code on their main site that redirects mobile visitors to the mobile version. All the steps on how to do this, including how to find prospects (no cold calling!) is demonstrated in our course.
The opportunity for this is right now. When the economy is stuffed, businesses need to get busy marketing and you are in a fantastic position to help. Anyone can build these sites because there is almost no graphic design required, they go together quickly and it is something that can be done part-time. Our approach is fully demonstrated in the How to earn $4000 a month as a part-time web developer course which is part of our Joomla Pro level.
Please, do this now. We need less people cursing at their phones.