Everyone and their dog has a smartphone these days—at least, affluent dogs on the road and the “influencer” dogs you want to be reaching.
So when the Foursquare Church asked us if we thought they should have a mobile site, we said, “Woof! Woof!” (Yes! Yes!)
It’s important to stay extremely focused when building a mobile site. Every pixel counts, and every kilobyte saved speeds up the page and might even save the end user money. And probably most importantly, the more streamlined and simple the user interface, the more success people will have using the mobile site.
So for Foursquare, we trimmed away from the main site’s wide list of content and features, and we focused on four things that visitors would most like to do:
- Learn about Foursquare
- Find a nearby church
- Get the latest news
- Look at useful tools
We then dug into each of those specific actions and determined how we could optimize that task for someone with a mobile device. We also tried to ensure that the site creators had to do the least amount of work to add to both the regular and the mobile site.
However, that doesn’t mean we made a simple site; there’s Twitter and Facebook integration, mobile search, embedded videos, fancy AJAX-ification of pages, contact forms, and more.
Despite the troubles we had with some of the current tools for mobile site building, we’re extremely happy with how the site came out, and the client is as well. And based on user feedback (and the continued improvement in the smart phone world), we’ll refine the site over time, too.
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