website
Three ways to get mobile and get noticed The responsive website
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he responsive website is a mobilefriendly approach in which the site responds to the size of the screen it’s viewed on. The screen size impacts how the page looks. “Whatever device — desktop or smartphone — the website behaves how it should behave on that device,” said Cariveau. For Echo Food Shelf, VoyageurWeb took the website’s horizontal home page and created a vertical mobile view with the menu in the middle of the screen. Now the site is easy for smart phone users to access and get the information they need. Responsive websites are VoyageurWeb’s favored approach for many clients, because they are the least expensive option while offering many benefits. Your site works well on smartphones and you do not need a separate mobile address so it reduces marketing costs. “You get a lot of bang for your buck,” said Cariveau
The mobile website
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mobile website is a separate site with its own m-dot address. The best, and sometimes the only, option for a website with a large infrastructure, graphics, databases and e-commerce is a mobile website. VoyageurWeb built an e-commerce mobile site for C&A Pro Skis, a manufacturer and seller of snowmobile skis. VoyageurWeb redirects smartphone users seamlessly to the C&A Pro Skis mobile website. “We only want them to promote one address,” said Cariveau.
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“We only want them to promote one address,”
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C&A Pro Skis’ customers attend snowmobile races and expos, where they use their phones to access the mobile site and buy skis and accessories for their snowmobiles. Users can choose from six buttons to view and purchase products. A major benefit of mobile websites is they are built exclusively for the mobile browser and can take advantage of some of the phone’s functions. It is generally designed to load much faster than a responsive site would, which is helpful to phone users on slower connections or with limited data plans. MV
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MN Valley Business • May 2013 • 23