Most emergency alert services, including Hyper-Reach, provide some kind of registration form for the public to use to sign up. But most of these are not set up to be mobile-friendly. So when you access them on a mobile browser, they’re almost impossible to read. The best exception to this is the registration page for the US National Emergency Alert Registry (www.usnear.org), which we sponsor.
The importance of being mobile-friendly hit us squarely when we read this statistic in an article from mobile expert Tomi Ahonen:
42% will not use a PC and will only access the internet on a mobile phone (smartphone or dumbphone)
This number is probably skewed a bit high for the US (the data is worldwide), since many folks outside the US don’t have Internet access except through a mobile phone. But 42%? That’s amazing.
And regardless of whether the US number is 25%, 35% or 40%, it should be clear that a registration page that doesn’t format for mobile browsers is going to miss a lot of people.
