Going Mobile - Advice Requested

[tvfoodmaps]

Hi, I run a website called tvfoodmaps.com.  We currently have a desktop website and a mobile app (native apps).  However the largest community of our users tend to use our desktop site on their mobile phones.  Our bounce rate is about 12% higher for mobile devices than desktop users and our pages per visit drops by almost 50% from desktop to mobile.  My hypothesis is that mobile users when presented with a "designed for desktop" site are more likely to leave since the navigation isn't as natural.

I'm considering investing in either a responsive design for the site or a dedicated mobile site and wanted the communities input on what metrics I should be looking at to determine "is it worth it"?  Or should I just stick with service the desktop version to the mobile users?

[ProductPearson]

In my opinion, just get your current template sliced for responsiveness. The fact your homepage has button style links means it is already cool and easy to use on a mobile device, and the detail pages have a mobile feel to them too. I think its simply because when you load it on a mobile device, its either very small and you have to zoom in and move around, or it simply cuts off half of the screen. example, go on http://ipadpeek.com/ and view the portrait version on iPad or iPhone,and you will see it's cutting off the right hand side.

Once your template is sliced, it will be responsive for mobile devices on any screen size.

Are you on Wordpress? It would cost only a couple hundred dollars to get it done properly.

[S_Curtis]

With big screen mobiles the old mimimal m. designs are less important but it is still critical to have fast page load times. If you have GA you can page load averages by browsers so you can see if mobile browsers are a lot slower. A slow site may well affect your bounce. There is a great blog post on the impact of site speed on mobile traffic at http://blog.kissmetrics.com/loading-time/

Also note that page speed (at least to first byte) affects search ranking see http://moz.com/blog/how-website-speed-actually-impacts-search-ranking so always important to optimise this.

Hope that helps?

[tvfoodmaps]

The site is not on wordpress, everything was coded from scratch.

[ProductPearson]

You can still get the template sliced.

[tvfoodmaps]

My plan wasn't really a minimal m. site, but a site that is fully optimized for high end devices - sort of how m.yelp.com works.  My current site does load much slower on the phone than on the desktop.  My concern with just slicing up the existing site may not be as much of an improvement from a performance standpoint as I may need to change how much data is loaded and other aspects of the site for mobile.

[tvfoodmaps]

Are you aware of any places I could get a quote on how much it would cost to have someone take a few pages of my site and "slice" them?

[DanielFreedman]

I work with a developer who is doing this for a site.

He is using a WP plugin and then slicing.

I agree that around $200 is a reasonable cost under such circumstances.

PM me for details.

[ProductPearson]

OP isn't using Wordpress, he said.