Mobile App vs. Mobile Website

The title of this article is slightly misleading—when it comes to mobile apps and mobile websites, you definitely don’t have to choose between the two. In fact, if a company has a strong web presence, they’re likely to have both a great mobile website and an awesome mobile app. However, both representations serve very different purposes, and both should be handled by completely separate teams of expert programmers and technicians if you really want to be successful.

All great businesses will no doubt ensure that their websites have mobile versions—in other words, when your company’s URL is accessed with a smartphone or tablet, the visitor is immediately redirected to a mobile-friendly version of the site (accommodating the much smaller screen size and browser window). If there isn’t a mobile-ready version of your homepage, then a huge percentage of your visitors will find an unappealing and difficult-to-navigate website, and that simply won’t do.

A mobile application can give you a number of crucially important benefits that a standard website cannot. First of all, since a mobile application is downloaded and installed on each user’s mobile device, you carve out a small wedge of customer real estate for every download. Even when users aren’t actively engaged with your app, it can still send you information on behaviour, browsing preferences, and geography —valuable data for any marketing team, especially for location-based text messages. If you want to create more incentives for customers to make quick purchases, an app is a perfect platform; not only will the ‘one-click’ format make accessing your product or service quicker, but you can introduce app-related coupons and savings programs to increase e-commerce. The ‘one-click’ ease of access also makes calling and locating your storefronts extremely convenient for your customers. You can also make sure your app is connected to social media sites to make sharing, tweeting, and reblogging your content a click away.

Obviously, your mobile applications should differ greatly from your standard mobile website since they serve such different purposes. Therefore, simply shuffling the task of app-creation to your web designer or tech team overlooks how fundamentally different these access points are. When you want to build an app that gives you a great ROI and meets all your sales, networking, and marketing objectives, you need to trust the very best mobile app development companies: fully integrated and professional organizations that bring to bear years of experience on every project, from start to finish. These top level organizations specialize in analyzing markets and demographics, designing and programming apps for multiple platforms, collaborating with your team for quality assurance, and deploying some of the most beautiful and effective applications on the market. If you can’t gamble on the success of your online initiatives, then never throw the dice on the people who build your app.

Hiring a specialized application development firm is a good first step in this situation, as you can be relatively certain that an organization that focuses on creating similar apps will know what it’s doing. Research a firm thoroughly, looking at things like the quality of the work, past customer satisfaction numbers, the services offered, how often the firm meets deadlines, and the cost involved, before hiring anyone. This application is important to the overall success of your business, so do your due diligence and find the firm that will work for you.

Having a quality mobile website and a popular application will make your brand stand out: if customers have a positive experience interacting with your various online representations, they’ll come to see you as a reliable organization that deserves their business. Make the app experience as pleasing as possible; work with the most attentive, dedicated, and accomplished app development company you can find, and cover all your bases in the new online marketplace.