Apps Killing Web Sites? What Web De­sign­ers Can Learn From App Developers

As a rule, most of us tend to think of apps and web­sites as very dif­fer­ent prod­ucts that are com­ple­men­tary rather than of­fer­ing com­pe­ti­tion for one another.

Apps ex­ist on mo­bile phones and tablets mostly, while web­sites are more likely to be en­joyed on the PC. And while we might use an app for find­ing our car, or mak­ing funny noises, web­sites tend to be the places we go to when we want to find real information.

The only prob­lem? Nei­ther of those state­ments are strictly true. These days more and more peo­ple are us­ing tablets and mo­bile phones over com­put­ers, and even Win­dows 8 desk­tops can run apps from an ‘app store’. Add to this the fact that many peo­ple use apps to read the news and their favourite blogs, and you can see that apps are very much en­croach­ing on web­sites and blogs.

Could the app kill the web­site star?

I would ar­gue no, and that there is still a place for tra­di­tional surf­ing if only be­cause it makes it so easy for us to move from one tory to the next (which you can’t do with an app that pro­vides a blog feed).

How­ever that said, it’s still im­por­tant to learn from app de­vel­op­ers if you want to avoid en­cour­ag­ing your read­ers to get their news and en­ter­tain­ment from a handy app rather than your web­site. Read on to find out how to adapt and sur­vive. Here’s what you can learn from smart apps…

Touch Friendly

Why might some­one choose to use the LinkedIn App over the web­site, even though the web­site is vastly su­pe­rior in terms of fea­tures and function?

Sim­ple: on a small mo­bile screen, the app is very sat­is­fy­ing and easy to use with nice large but­tons and no ads to click ac­ci­den­tally. There is no URL and to type, and thee text is nice and big, so gen­er­ally it’s great for quickly flick­ing through the lat­est news with­out con­stantly hit­ting the wrong thing. Your web­site can ben­e­fit from be­ing like that too…

Fast

An­other thing about apps is that they’re fast and don’t use up too much data.

When you’re on the move this is in­cred­i­bly use­ful as you don’t want to have to stand there wait­ing for a huge back­ground im­age to load up. If you have a mo­bile ver­sion of your site then make sure that it uses small im­ages that load in a sen­si­ble order.

Mon­eti­sa­tion

Some­thing worth bear­ing in mind, is that most apps don’t have ads all over them.

They ex­ist to pro­mote the com­pa­nies that re­lease them and make money in other ways (ei­ther you need to buy them, or they of­fer in app pur­chases). This makes peo­ple more likely to choose an ad-free app over your web­site, which in turn means a lower CPC for you.

The an­swer? To make your ads much more sub­tle wher­ever pos­si­ble and pos­si­bly even to con­sider mon­etis­ing in other ways. Per­haps it’s time you sold a prod­uct from your site in­stead of beg­ging for clicks on ir­ri­tat­ing adverts?