Should you have a mobile version of your website / Blog?

If you walk on the any of the city streets in India, you will rarely see people without mobile phones. More than half of these people have new generation mobile phones sporting big screens and GPRS having internet access. Infact, as per a recent study more than 30 million Indians have access to internet via mobile phones compared to that with 4.2 million normal subscribers accessing Internet on PCs.

Considering such a vast population with mobile Internet access, do you think businesses should start having a mobile version of their websites?

According to me, only a few select niche of websites bring value by having a mobile version, apart from that, I really do not think mobile version of a normal website/blog makes any sense. Yes, no doubt you can have opt-in alert services that send a sms on-demand, but other than that accessing website on mobile for browsing just does not make sense.

I will tell you my personal experience. Last month, my friend bought a brand new Smartphone with Internet access. Just to try out, I did browse a few websites, including my blog and honestly it was not a great experience. Even, if I had a mobile version of this blog, it would be too cumbersome to read a 300 to 400 word post without causing discomfort to eyes.

Having said that, I should mention, sometimes having mobile internet access helps. There are a few niche sites that bring value by having a mobile version. Like if you are on road have lost your way, and need to find directions (mostly here in US), you can quickly go to Google maps or mapquest to search the directions. Another niche is local search. Again, if you are on the road and want to search a good restaurant in vicinity, having mobile internet access really helps.

Tip:

If you are wanting to go mobile, there are a few tools out there to help developing with mobile sites, you can use this mobile emulator to see what your site looks like in a mobile, there’s also a great mobile page checker that tells you what you need to do to make your page mobile compatible.