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Mobile App or Mobile Website: Which is Right for Your Winery?

Many wineries are looking at how best to present their company and wines to the increasing number of people accessing content through their smartphones. Now, with the increased use of QR Codes for wines, it becomes more important to have a Mobile strategy for your winery. So the question we get asked frequently is whether to create a mobile app or a mobile website.

First, the similarities. Both a mobile app and a mobile website display content formatted to the small screen of a mobile device, both can have a similar look & feel, and both can have an icon on the visitor's phone.

The main difference is that a mobile app is developed, packaged, then uploaded to the iTunes and/or Android app stores. People find them, purchase them (if they're not free) and download them to their phone. I searched the iTunes iPhone app store for "winery" and saw about 10 wineries that had apps. Most of the app content is static (at least from the basic app builder tools), so if you have a new event that you post to the app, the people must download a new version of the app to see it. More advanced app builder tools may be able to access content over the Internet. Apps can also access other components of the phone, like the camera or GPS.

A mobile website, which can also be called a web app, does not appear on the app stores, so people searching there will not find your winery. Apple does have a web app store, so your web app could be listed there.  To access your mobile website (web app), people use their phone's browser to view mobile-formatted pages that you create (of have created). Some of the pages may be cached locally on the phone, so the person could return to it if they don't have an Internet connection, but many of the pages typically require the person to have 3G or WiFi coverage. Mobile websites can also be viewed on a wider number of mobile devices outside of an iPhone or Android device. Also if a winery is wanting to use QR Codes, a mobile website is a plus as each QR Code can point to a specific page on your mobile website.

So which is better for the average winery? I'd vote for a mobile website. If the added exposure in the app stores is important to the winery, there are tools to convert a mobile website into an app.

Now a blurb about what WineWeb does in the mobile space. We have a mobile website component as an add-on to our enhanced website plan. The mobile website has its own navigation menu structure and looks and feels like a mobile app. The big plus with our mobile website is that you manage all the content from a single place, so when you add a new wine it appears on your website and also the mobile version. Browse to testvineyards.com using your mobile phone or scan this QR Code to see an example. The system automatically senses the mobile device and displays the mobile website.  Note the toolbar at the bottom of the pages, which give the website visitor easy clicks to your important information.

The other thing that now comes with our mobile website service is our QR Code management tool.  This allows you to generate QR Codes and have them point to a specific page on your mobile website, then you can manage where that points to over the life of the code.
 



This post first appeared on Wine Technology Blog @ WineWeb.com, please read the originial post: here

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