How many times you have seen a decent looking website on your mobile phone (or tablet) and you got amazed? That's because they are either optimized to look great on mobile or they are specifically made for mobile devices.

Here at Intellial, when client comes to us asking to make his website look good on mobile devices, we guide him by presenting various approaches available and discuss which is most suitable for him in terms of both cost and efforts. Here I give you some highlights of which approaches we follow:

Approach 1

Web designers know that when they make a website design they have to keep the lowest resolution in mind and create the layout in a way that it looks good across the screen sizes. See for example Asp.net official website in three different screen sizes. 

On large 22" monitor 

On small 12" Netbook screen

On 3.5" mobile screen

Now, if you open www.asp.net on a device with any screen size it certainly look decent because the website is optimized for different screen sizes. Remember it is just optimized (not a separate mobile verison) it's still a same website which looks differently on different screen sizes. 

 Approach 2

While approach 1 requires least amount of efforts among the approaches available it can get complex (and messy) for existing websites which already has lot of content, for them best approach would be to have a separate and clean mobile version of website or create a native mobile app (that we will talk about in 3rd approach).

There are popular framework exists to create a dedicated mobile website like Sencha Touch and JQuery Mobile. These frameworks have built-in support for touch interface and comes with touch UI elements. Mobile framework creates a genuine experience with touch friendly UI and contents. 

Take a look at a mobile website we have recently made for a Japanese restaurant, a dedicated mobile website based on JQuery Mobile framework makes navigation of menu items a breeze. First two screenshots are of mobile site and the 3rd one is of the regular website.

Approach 3

Creating a Native application for your website (or product) will give the best user experience but it will also be the most time consuming one (hence costly). Having a native app will allow you to let users download it via marketplace like Apple's iTunes Store or Google Play Store. 

Native apps gives the best user experince in terms of UI and performance because they are running Off the device itself. It also has unique advantage of leveraging native features like camera and various sensors.

But on the other hand you have to create separate app for each platform which increases the efforts and hence cost drastically. 

However, there are products like PhoneGap exists which converts your Mobile Web app into native app, so you write your app once and package them for multiple platform in very short steps. This can save a lot of time (and hence cost). 

How to decide which approach is best

Well, there are certain clear factors that can help you decide which approach is best in given scenario:

• If you have a simple static Read Only website then go for approach 1.
• If you have a Read Only website with dynamic content (like product catalog with nested categories etc) then go for approach 2. A dedicated mobile web interface will help a lot.
• If you are build a mobile game or your use case requires native feature access (like camera or sensors etc) then approach 3 is the only option.

Intellial has team of experienced mobile developers, we can covert your static website into a mobile app in any platform (i.e. Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry etc). You can choose to develop either in mobile web or native. Contact us now and we will be more than happy to help you.