Reaching your mobile audience: app or website?

Remember back to the olden, golden days of the World Wide Web when your organization's marketing and IT teams were scrambling to create a “presence” on the “information superhighway”? Times were simpler then, when brochure-ware ruled the landscape as we (im)patiently waited for a company's home page to load at the blazing rate of 14.4 kilobits-per-second.

Could any of us imagined a day not long in the future when we'd be enlisting our design teams to create entire web applications or web sites for handheld devices with a screen the size of a credit card? With super high-res graphics, text, data and video displays that load in a nanosecond?

And yet here we are. Most every organization’s marketing outreach program now includes a strategy to best determine how to create a “mobile presence” on a user’s handheld device (such as a smartphone) or tablet (such as the ubiquitous iPad). There are, for all intents and purposes, four options: 1) create a mobile application; 2) create a mobile website; 3) do a combination of both; 4) do neither and simply work to optimize your existing website.

As always, you need to determine which approach makes the most sense for your organization, primarily in terms of your user groups, budget, and intended purpose. Let’s take a closer look at the available options.