Is the text large enough to read without a magnifying glass? Can you click the button with your finger rather than a toothpick?
Google is also giving websites a bigger reason to care about such things. It has set an April 21 deadline to achieve mobile friendliness. Websites that don’t will be shoved down the list of results that come up when a consumer conducts a search.
Many larger companies have addressed this concern, but the same isn’t true for many smaller businesses.
“The people in the middle, who maybe made an investment in a website five, 10 years ago,” face the biggest risk, said Jeremy Jacobs, director of strategy at Columbus-based marketing firm Resource/Ammirati.
“They’re big enough to not use a WordPress (free website) type service, and instead maybe they’r e hosting the website themselves. It’s a custom design they built — a law firm is a good example of that, or a small retailer.”
To address the concern for law firms, the Ohio State Bar Association signed an agreement last year with Columbus-based Effective Global Communications to advise Ohio law firms on how to create mobile-friendly versions of their websites.
The move on behalf of the law firms was a smart one because “the mobile landscape changes every six months,” said Billy May, senior vice president of digital and e-commerce for Abercrombie & Fitch.
“Organizations that invest in digital as a capital investment, they may be caught off guard by this deadline because they haven’t invested enough resources. It’s something I feel we’ve been ahead of the curve for the last couple of years.”
Liz Lessner, whose Columbus Food League owns Dirty Frank’s, Grass Skirt Tiki Room, Surly Girl Saloon, Tip Top and the resurrected Chintz Room, is far from hitting the panic button.
“You know, I receive about a zillion emails selling me services to be more mobile-friendly, and I’ve not bitten yet,” she said. “I’m sure we will upgrade at some point, but our local customers, our bread and butter, know how to find us, and I’m OK with that for now.”
For central Ohio’s biggest retailers, the deadline is being met with what amounts to a collective shrug.
“For our clients, who are usually quite large, the drive to be on mobile happened a long time ago,” Jacobs said. “This isn’t a moment where they have something to fear.”
Abercrombie & Fitch is one of those companies. The retailer’s website is the top listing for a search on “Abercrombie.” The retailer has long made mobile commerce a top priority, May said.
“We’ve been investing in our own mobile platform for years, working collaboratively with Google to make content better.”
Abercrombie decided “to invest in mobile over, let’s say, apps or tablets, because of our target consumer,” May said. That consumer is a teenager or 20-something who has been a heavy user of mobile devices since childhood.
Google has a tool that allows users to find out if a website is mobile-friendly. For retailer after retailer in central Ohio, putting the name in that tool produces the same result as it does for Abercrombie: “Awesome! This page is mobile-friendly,” Google reports.
An interesting exception: Although L Brands’ top chains, Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works, are very easy to use on mobile devices, the company’s corporate site, LB.com, is not.
But that’s to be expected, Jacobs said. Customers need to have easy access to the chains’ websites, while the same customers would be highly unlikely to have any need to go to the corporate parent’s site.
©2015 The Columbus Dispatch (Columbus, Ohio) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC
