Mobile-Ready Site with Sitecore

Written by Shilpa Tawar

Reach your customers where they are.

Your customers are moving from one location to another with mobile eCommerce that is accessible to them via smart phones, iPads, and other devices. A Quantcast Mobile Trends Study showed that mobile web usage in the U.S. grew 110 percent in 2010, while worldwide growth was up 148 percent. As of late 2010, smartphones outsold PCs for the first time, and the trend continues. Through mobile devices, customers can browse your site, place orders, pay online bills – the list grows. You can create or migrate to a mobile compatible platform like Sitecore, to prevent your business from missing these consumers-on-the-move, and ultimately, grow your bottom line.

Sitecore can manage Mobile must-haves:

Click to Call: All mobile users have to do is click the number and their smartphone will call you, allowing them to instantly and directly engage with your business; as simple as it should be.
Tracking Success: Google Analytics – the ubiquitous and free tool that shows you how many people visit your mobile site, from which devices and how often, along with where they live, how they found your site and so much more. Learn important metrics like: which social channels drive people to your mobile instance and what content they share from it.
Easy Integration with Google Maps: Extremely useful for customers for tracking physical location and/or inventory.
Create once – Display many: Improve user experience by making sure your site is optimized for their device while simultaneously simplifying content creation for your marketing team. Your team creates content once and Sitecore properly delivers the content to each user’s device.
New Device Support: New devices are seemingly coming to market daily. Rather than program a new presentation template each time as these devices arrive, Sitecore includes a feature to present the same content on different devices, eliminating the need for reprogramming. Mobile SDK and Item Web API support simplifies app development using native tools.
Content Optimization and Device Detection: Detect and serve content optimized for the devices your visitors utilize, protect your user experence and better serve your web community.

Dedicated Mobile Version or Responsive Site?

You can create a standalone dedicated mobile website separate from your main website. For example: if your main site is www.betterecommercesite.com, then your dedicated mobile site would likely appear as m.betterecommercesite.com., with the “m.” signifing mobile. You can instead opt for a single website that displays content responsively for different devices and browser types.
Responsive design targets different smartphones, tablets and other screens in a clean way, pulling from a single layout for almost all devices. In our opinion, responsive design is good, but there must also be adaptive design within, with a best practice being a mix of the two. Responsive-designed content is properly displayed while Adaptive design ensures the page weight sent to each mobile device is much lighter, eliminating unnecessary content for faster browsing.
Responsive recommended by Google: This is because responsive design sites have one URL and the same HTML, regardless of device, which makes it easier and more efficient for Google to crawl, index, and organize content. This helps you improve rank and avoid penalties.
Future-proof: One of the biggest benefits of responsive design is that the size of the Sitecore template is designed based on the screen dimensions, not the specific device. As future web-friendly devices (TVs, watches, glasses, etc.) come to market, your responsive site will continue to look beautiful.