Hunting w/ Your Phone

I live at the end of a dead-end dirt road that’s a secret spot for several deer hunters I know. For years, I have grumbled that terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq have better cell phone coverage than we do in my neck of the woods.

But that has finally changed, and the half-wit phone I’ve been using for the past year  with mediocre success has finally started to pick up enough 3G reception (yeah, we are that far behind the times) that I can actually use the smart-phone features it has had all along.

It used to be your cell phone was the first thing you would turn off when you headed into the back country. How many trophy deer were lost to the inconvenient cell-phone ring tone blasting “Tequilla Sunrise” at just the wrong moment by hunters who forgot to mute their phones? We’ll never know for sure.

But today, more and more hunters, anglers, and outdoor enthusiasts are walking outdoors with smartphones at the hip. GPS, built-in still and video cameras, apps up one side and down the next, and the whole world of useful outdoors information are as handy as your favorite sidearm. Today’s smartphones are more useful than a Swiss Army Knife out in the woods … and reception in remote areas is improving more rapidly than ever before.

For outdoors-industry marketers, the smartphone revolution is hard to ignore, but it’s hard to know where to get started. My advice — start with your website.

Make sure your website is optimized for smartphones. By this, I mean that when someone finds you on their smartphone, you’ve got a scaled-down, short, concise version of your website that’s legible and designed for those little screens. This used to be solely the realm of techno-geeks who speak HTML better than they speak English, but Smartphone Optimization isn’t as scary as it used to be.

Google’s Mobilizer, for example, let’s you see what your website looks like on a small-screen mobile device — http://www.google.com/gwt/n. This is helpful if you understand the value of smartphone marketing, but only use a half-wit or totally studpid cell phone like I’ve been using.

A quick glance at my own website reveals — uuggghh — a pretty smartphone unfriendly mess. All that careful design work I did to make my website look great on computer is gone … pictures float around in white space disconnected from the text … and the navagiation doesn’t even show up on the first page.

Now, if you’re like me you’ll need help with the back-end code, techy stuff to get that website up to snuff for smartphones, but help is just a phone call away. If you need help, just give me a call at 231-526-7683 and I’ll hook you up with the people who can convert your existing site to one that’s Smartphone friendly … and because your website can swing both ways (smartphone or computer friendly) with the same back-end adjustments, you’re beloved website can stay just the way it is for the computer.

Well, it’s time for me to get hunting … for a new smartphone, that is!

Now Get Out There,