Who else is sick of trying to access a website from a Blackberry, Android or iPhone only to be unable to view the site properly, due to the site not being mobile-friendly? Ugh! It is very annoying when that happens and it is happening way too often! It amazes me how many companies are missing the mark when it comes to mobile. Considering the fact that the number of Smartphone users continues to grow, more and more people will be utilizing their devices to access the internet. Companies ought to create a mobile friendly version of their website in order to serve their customers better. It is beyond frustrating for someone trying to find basic information such as your store hours, phone number, current promotions or directions, to not be able to get this information because you do not have a mobile-friendly version of your website.
A mobile website should be simplistic in nature and certainly does not need to be like your full website. The cost to design a mobile website is also relatively inexpensive.
The mobile website should contain basic information that people want or need to see. As an example, here is our mobile website, compared to our full website. As you can see, we have skinned the mobile site to have a similar color scheme to our regular site. We have then included just a few pages: Home, About Us, Contact us and Services. In addition, we have made our full website available from the mobile site, as well as included links to our Social Media channels.
There are no excuses. Too many people are forgoing their laptops and PC’s and simply using their Smartphone’s instead. You must have a mobile friendly version of your website immediately if not sooner. Go mobile or go home!
You have stepped up to the plate and made the (smart) decision to create a mobile friendly version of your website. That is great news, especially because the number of mobile users continues to rise and you ought to ensure that your website can accommodate this growing market segment. So, now all you have left to do is design the mobile site and you’re done, right? WRONG! Just when you think you have all of your bases are covered, you don’t. There are a few important factors to consider before building out your mobile site.
For starters, there are many different smartphones available for people to choose from. You might be asking yourself, what exactly is a smartphone? According to Wikipedia, “a smartphone is a mobile phone that offers more advanced computing ability and connectivity than a contemporary basic feature phone. Smartphones may be thought of as handheld computers integrated within a mobile phone.” Examples of the most commonly used smartphones are: iPhone, Blackberry, Android, etc. Now you might be asking yourself, does it really matter which device a visitor uses to access my website? Won’t having a mobile version make for a positive user experience for every smartphone user? The answer is probably not, reason being, not all smartphones will render the same. This is why it’s hugely important to identify which devices your visitors are using to view your website. Having this knowledge will afford you the ability to tailor to the vast majority of your mobile audience. For example, when creating mobile websites for clients, our Design and Development teams utilize simulator testing, which will actually “simulate” how the site will render on each device. In addition, they will create custom versions to support the most popular devices accessing your site, as well as install JavaScript, which will detect which device is being used, then display the appropriate version.
Now, you might be asking yourself, how do I figure out which devices my visitors are using? This information can be easily found in your analytics program. If you utilize Google Analytics, click on Visitors (on the left navigation) then click on Mobile and finally, Mobile Devices. The results may astound you! Remember: having a mobile site is only half the battle; it should be optimized properly for your mobile audience, whatever that audience might be.
Do you have a blog set up using WordPress? If you don’t and are considering setting up a blog, you might like the features that WordPress provides to manage your blog through your smart phone. The great thing about WordPress is that it is developed by volunteers who keep creating plugins and improvements to the blog software. Below you can find some of its greatest additions yet.
There is an application available for the iPhone and iPad, which provide several functions that, enable creating posts with multiple kinds of information easily. Some of the features provided include location mapping, which allows you to add to your post where you are posting from. There is also the adding Photos feature, which allows you to select as many photos as you would like to add to your blog post from the ones available on your phone, and WordPress will automatically add the images to your blog post. Another feature is how easy it is to add comments to posts, to keep in touch with your readers, through an interface provided that is easy to moderate and use.
A new feature that was introduce early this month, is the post by voice option, which allows you to publish audio on your blog by following simple steps. All you need to do is enable the post by voice option on your blog, which is located under the dashboard section of your blog and select to enable the feature. WordPress will provide you with a phone number you can call and generate a secret code that is unique to your blog, which allows you to call in and follow the instructions to create your voice post.
Due to real time search results provided by search engines, it is good to keep your blog as up to date as possible to allow a better search result for your site and blog. Sometimes it’s hard to keep updating your blog, but thanks to technology, this is becoming easier to accomplish. I hope to see this application will become available soon for other phones.
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