It’s not like you have the most complex designed website in the world. So why should you care about how “mobile-friendly” that website is? Well, let’s put it this way:

  • Do you care about how you’ll be found when people are searching for contractors like you?
  • Do you care about how readable the type on your site is when someone’s looking at it through a smartphone?
  • Do you care if your website’s links are hard to find?

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Hopefully, the answers to questions like these are, “Yes, yes and yes.”

Sure, a lot of business in the tradesman’s line of work may ultimately get done over the phone or face-to-face, but before that, your prospective customer may be in “research mode” looking for a contractor. Considering that 182 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones by the end of last year according to marketing measurement leader comScore, Inc., you can be sure that many of those prospects are doing researching from the comfort of their smartphones.

1 in 4 searches around the world are conducted on a mobile device, which makes a mobile version of your website just as important as a traditional version for the desktop. On top of that, Google continues to suggest that if your website doesn’t have a readable version for mobile, your search ranking will risk being hurt so that people will have a harder time finding you.

So what are you supposed to do about it? Start learning a bunch of code? Not at all.

The word here that you’ll often hear with this topic is “optimized.” You want your website optimized for people to view and use on their smartphones too. To get there, interview a few different website writers or designers your colleagues have used. Tell them that you’d like to see your site load fast on a handheld device and be just as easy for people to read on mobile as it is on a desktop.

Naturally, they’ll have some thoughts and suggestions too, which can be great, but don’t let them talk over your head in programming language. Ask them to break it down in plain English. You need to understand what they’re doing from start to finish. If you’re not understanding what they’re saying and they can’t explain it well enough, move on to someone who can.

Then, based on your comfort with their style, plan and affordability, make the call on someone who can do a lot for ensuring you have a version of your site that reflects the devices your prospective customers are practically glued to. If you need help optimizing your site for mobile platforms please give us a call. We can help you find someone competent to do so.