Summary: Moving ‚from desktop to mobile‘ is the fourth corporate website trend we identified. This post is part of a series of blog posts in which we look at trends for corporate websites.
I believe this trend is already well understood and I don’t have to explain it in greater detail. With the omnipresence of mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) people can access information whenever and wherever. This leads to great opportunities. But there are different ways of moving from desktop to mobile.
1) Mobile site or responsive/adaptive design?
Some time ago mobile sites of corporate websites were quite common. Most of them look like m.companyname.com. BASF and Siemens are still using this approach.
In the past years responsive / adaptive design has climbed the stage and seems to become the default option for organisation currently thinking about relaunching their corporate website. Both responsive and adaptive designs run on one codebase. Responsive web design uses flexible and fluid grids, and adaptive design relays on predefined screen sizes. (this article has more detail on the differences). In both cases though content and navigation are rearranged depending on the screen size of the device used. Shell was one of the early companies to adopt responsive design.
Desktop version of Shell’s corporate website
Responsive version of Shell’s corporate website
Have a look at this article that describes in more detail the differences between a mobile site and one with responsive design.
2) Mobile Apps
It was to be expected that with the availability of mobile apps, companies would jump on the bandwagon and create such apps. Whether this makes sense or not depends on different factors. Mobile apps can provide a richer feature set and have more access to elements of your smartphone. But most corporate websites only serve static content (for now), which raises the question whether a separate mobile app where content will need to be uploaded separately and versions for different operating systems will need to be developed and maintained, makes a lot of sense. Time will tell.
Below is a screenshot of Unilever’s Investor Relations App.
Unilever Investor Centre App
It basically provides all the content that can also be found on the corporate website. Additional value seems to be missing, which I believe is a huge drawback. You could imagine expanding this app to include information about Unilever’s Annual General Meetings especially for participants to receive local content and services when attending on site. Companies should always consider things that are useful for the audience, let it be journalists, investors or others.
Cisco is taking it slightly further with its mobile app.
Cisco mobile app
It offers latest news and promotional offers, videos and podcasts. It also allows users to find events and Cisco partners in their area, local phone number for Cisco support and receive current security alerts, advisories and responses. As you can see, the app provides localised content which might be more useful to users than generic content that can also be found on the corporate website. Thus, the app does not only provide information but also a service. This is another trend for corporate websites that we see and will discuss in a later blog post.
Before I come to the end, I will leave you with the ENI SandArtist mobile app. Users can create their own masterpieces on sand and share it with their networks. Well, here is mine:
My masterpiece using ENI’s SandArtis mobile app
This blog post is part of a series of posts in which we delve into the trends for corporate website that we have identified. The series:
- From static to real-time information
- From text to active content
- From channel to canvas
- From desktop to mobile
- From single source of truth to the provider of different opinions
- From destination to platform
- From providing information to providing a service
- From company centric design to user centric design
- From single launch to continuous improvement
© Picture Credit: Lauren Manning
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