Mobile Websites: What You Need to Know
Mobile phones have become an important part of our lives, especially mobile smart phones. Since the advent of Apple iPhone, things have certainly changed in the mobile market and how we look at the Internet. The smart phone market is already going strong and expected to go bigger in the coming years, with people accessing the Web on the go and being online from everywhere. This brings us to the obvious question: How do we as Internet marketers tap into this vast, high potential market? The answer is by having an mobile-friendly and mobile-optimized website. If you want to stay ahead of the crowd, then getting your business a mobile website (mobile-friendly version of your current website) will give you the needed edge over the competition. Let’s find out what you need to keep in mind when designing your mobile site.
Mobile Websites Rule #1: Avoid Too Much Content: When you’re involved in mobile marketing and specifically with designing mobile websites, you have to keep in mind that the mobile phones have smaller screen space, which is why you need to bring down the amount of information you use on your web pages. Keep your design and content minimal, and try to make a strong impact with less, and not more. Your target audience here are mobile users that want to quickly flip through pages and get the most out of them. Aim at giving them a great mobile experience with your website. Designing your mobile website and turning it bulky is not the way to go; it not only makes you look unprofessional but at the same time fails at fulfilling the main purpose of delivering a quality experience to the users.
Mobile Websites Rule #2: Make Your Mobile Sites Load Quickly: Yes, it’s the new mobile generation where you have technologies such as 3G, but still, the mobile phone works at much lower bandwidth speeds, which you can’t ignore. The kind of technology we have today is definitely much better than what we used to have before, but it’s still a long way to go before websites load lightening fast on our mobile phones. In order to make your sites faster, have smaller files, lighter and more compact graphics and cut down on each and every element that is not necessary. Your main objective here is to create an extremely mobile friendly website, where your visitors don’t have to wait. If you look around, you’ll see that most of the popular mobile websites are very lightweight and are designed from ground up to give the users a better experience.
Mobile Websites Rule #3: Don’t Confuse Mobile Website Visitors
The fact is, attention span on a mobile website is often limited and not as much as it is when you’re browsing it on a computer. This is obvious because people tend to skip from one site to another fairly fast on mobiles. So when you have to deliver content to your readers, only tell something that’s necessary, so that they don’t get confused.
Designing effective mobile websites is all about balancing the various elements and getting them right. What we discussed in this article isn’t that difficult to apply, but it will definitely help you make your mobile site stand out of the crowd.
