Fifty years ago the world was getting smaller. People had begun driving motor-vehicles and traveling by air! It was a modern world in which distance was becoming less relevant.

How archaic, right? Well, at least our children will think so. After all, I flew a few weeks ago and had wireless internet on the flight for the first time! It is amazing: my daughter is growing up in a world in which I can receive an email in the air, abroad or in the car. She can download free games any time she likes and, even though she’s only six, she knows that anything we don’t know we can just look up online.

Information Availability

Nowdays if you have a smart phone, and a lot of the world and the US does, you are never disconnected. Whether you are out shopping for a specialty product and looking at your phone for the nearest seller, receiving a text from your favorite restaurant that is inviting you in for a free dessert or your phone dings with an emergency text message from the office, you carry connectivity with you. Even thirty thousand feet up in the air!

As a consumer, I love it! After all, like most people, I’m busy raising a child, running a home and a business. The more technology makes my life easy, the more I feel like I can handle things and be flexible, since I can take care of things from anywhere. I can communicate with family, chat with the office and see if my local home improvement store has the part I need on my way to taking my daughter to the movie next door. A little crazy-busy? Yes, but convenient too.

Be Like An Airplane

Smart business owners recognize the benefit of being so accessible and convenient, so they are making mobile websites just for smart phones. This allows their clients and potential clients to easily find them and find the information they are after from a smaller, smart phone-friendly site. These sites offer the key things that we, the consumers, are after: a click-to-call phone number and map, basic information on the businesses’ products and services and business hours. Other tabs on the site might offer more details, but the basics is all we are after when we are out and about in this shrinking world of ours.

Be Found

The smaller world also means that a lot of businesses with an online and social media presence find that their clients don’t have to be local. A brand strategist, like our client Robin Fisher Roffer, gets named a top 5 Branding Guru and has clients everywhere, even India. Another client, famous in Santa Fe for amazing food, Plaza Cafe Southside has great activity on their Facebook Fan Page and responds here to a request to buy their home-made granola and have it shipped. Even galleries now have a following of thousands, so that Mark White Fine Art sells their kinetic wind sculptures all over the world through their website. Could it be that one will be ordered from an airplane?

Become Smart-Accessible

If you don’t have a plan to make your website mobile phone-friendly, you are likely leaving money on the table. A simple mobile website, with your basic information, is all you really need. Depending on your graphics and pages, you can have this done for just a few hundred dollars. Don’t wait to be as accessible, or risk becoming outdated in this ever-changing world that now offers wireless in flights!