With much of our personal websurfing now being done through mobile devices (hey, it’s something to do while waiting in line!), many websites have created apps to make navigating to their sites that much easier. In a way, apps have become like bookmarks or favorites for our mobile devices.

But, as webdesigners ourselves, do we need to take the time and trouble to make an app for our own sites just yet? Well, as I discovered while thinking and researching for this article, it depends.

Biggest Reasons to Build an App for Your Site

• Your site has a HUGE readership and lots of web traffic per day
• More complete control over how content displays on all mobile devices
• Offers a simpler way for users to access your site

If you have a blog that already gets a lot of attention, or a website that many people use, an app may be just the ticket to help boost your popularity and usage to the next level. Also, if you’ve studied your website statistics and have seen that a large percentage of your visitors are using mobile browsers to visit your site, making an app could be a great idea. Lastly, if you don’t want to build a separate mobile version of your site, an app can be a simpler, sleeker “mobile portal” of sorts for your content. (Case in point: I use the Beautylish app from Beautylish.com every day to read their articles without loading all the layout graphics and extraneous stuff from their desktop site.)

As a personal example, I’ve considered building an app for this blog to help with my mobile readership, since I update every day and get a fair following on Twitter–people might appreciate a simpler link to my blog. I’ve also noticed how I have to zoom in when I read my own blog on my iPhone, and have thought how great it would be to have a simpler layout and better social media functionality all wrapped up in an app.

Biggest Reasons NOT to Build an App for Your Site

• It’s something else for readers/viewers to download and store on their devices, rather than just visiting a mobile-friendly site
• Have to keep updating the app to stay current with mobile platforms
• Can bring unforeseen complications, like app crashes, bugs, etc., which interfere with usage

If you’ve just got a small personal site, or a site you mainly build and maintain for hobby purposes, creating an app for your site is likely not going to be very helpful for you. An app is one more thing to keep updating, and could introduce more programming issues than you really want to handle, especially for those of us who don’t get into much web programming beyond HTML and CSS. (Even the apps that are “made for you” can have bugs, and they’ll still need updating, too.) And if your app doesn’t offer much more functionality than just visiting your site through a mobile browser, viewers might not opt for downloading it anyway. (Case in point: I downloaded the Google app, but found it to be so slow that I switched back to using Google in a mobile browser.)

Making an app for my main domain, withinmyworld.org, for instance, would be quite frankly a waste of time and effort at this point, since my domain is mainly a personal site and portal to all my other sites. It would be little more than a gimmick at best, since I know I probably wouldn’t update the app all that much (not much to update!).

Bottom Line: Site Size, Topic, and Popularity Matter, But…

If you want to put the time and effort into building an app yourself, or creating one using an online service, make sure you’ve done your homework beforehand. Having an app can be a great asset, or it can be little more than a superfluous gimmick. To me, frequently-updated blogs or sites with very helpful, often-accessed content would benefit most from having an app, and personal sites or hobby sites are better off not worrying about it.

BUT! If you really want an app and think it could rocket your little site into popularity, that is your choice to make. Who knows–if you’ve got a lot of people visiting your site via mobile devices, the app could just make their visits easier, and word-of-mouth advertising would spread it further!

App Creation Tips and Services

If you’re interested in creating an app but don’t necessarily have all the programming skills to do it yourself, here are some sites to check out:

How to Make a Blog or Site into a Mobile App without Programming Knowledge, @ Lifehacker

App-Making Sites

AppMakr (iPhone; Android beta)
AppsGeyser.com (Android)
Conduit (iPhone, Android, HTML5; Windows Phone coming soon)
Genwi.com (Helps you build one app in the “cloud,” and then they make it workable for iPad, Android, iPhone, etc.)
Phonegap (more hands-on app making with HTML/CSS/Javascript; supports iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and some others I don’t even know)