Let's face it, there are a lot of options out there when it comes to establishing or updating your online brand. 61% of customers click away to a competitor site after visiting a Web site that isn't optimized for their mobile device (Source). It's just a matter of when your online brand gets a makeover.

These days, Google incorporates responsiveness into their page rankings and there are numerous services offering to host a mobile-optimized Web site - "no coding experience necessary".

Third-party services providing mobile Web sites with a templated approach, such as Dudamobile or Mofuse and content management solutions like WordPress and Joomla, make it simple to give your business a mobile presence. But what do you really get?

Third-party services take the customer away from your site to a separate hosting provider by redirecting mobile users when they are detected. While this may seem like a great option - frequently the browser-based management of these types of sites seems appealing - there are disadvantages to the approach that may not be readily apparent.The most important being the loss of branding developed by your desktop Web site. Equally important is the loss the shared search engine optimizations. Finally, maintaining two different sites and keeping the information current on both is easy to overlook and adds additional costs to your business..

A content management solution, such as WordPress or Joomla, allows you to quickly set up and manage your own Web site. There are plugins available which will automatically translate your site to a mobile layout. Though this overcomes the disadvantage of maintaining multiple sites, using the simple plugins gives you little to no control over the finished product. Once again, you lose the branding that is so important to differentiating yourself from your competition. In fact, if both you and your competition are using WordPress and the same mobile plugin, both sites will appear exactly the same on mobile devices, completely erasing your custom branding.

The ideal approach to optimizing your Web site and establishing a mobile presence is known as "responsive design". Essentially, this means a site should be designed with two or more layout configurations (a mobile and a desktop layout) so that it will respond to the device's screen size.

In many cases, only minimal additional planning is required by the designer. If done well, it will be as simple to maintain as any third-party solution. This methodology can also be used with content management solutions (in lieu of one of the plugins), keeps your Web site's custom branding in place, reduces costs (you only pay one hosting provider), and simplifies maintainenance (you need only maintain the content on one site). Perhaps most importantly, the money you spend on search engine optimization is maximized because both desktop and mobile sites use the same optimizations.

Choosing a designer knowledgeable about responsive design and recent developments in the mobile Web environment as well as new technologies and design methods and the future of mobile is an important aspect of establishing your mobile presence. Choose wisely and make sure that you can respond to your customer's viewing habits.