4 Tips to Help Your Company Optimize for Mobile

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Mobile marketing has become a must these days as more and more people are using their cell phones for more than simply making phone calls.  According to a study done by RipRoad, over 234 million Americans have cell phones and around 42.7 million actively used smartphones between Nov. 2009 and Jan. 2010. A study done by Pew has stated that although 83% of adults have either smartphones or cell phones, of that number 35% have accessed the Internet from their mobile device.  With these kinds of numbers, it’s no wonder more and more companies are optimizing their website for mobile browsers.  Optimizing your site may not be as hard as you think—below are 4 main points to ponder over if you are thinking about going mobile.  Loading Time The first rule of thumb when it comes to mobile web design is to have your site load quickly.  If you don’t have a site that is quick to load you are going to lose a lot of potential visitors—which could affect your company’s bottom line.  Some quick tips for better loading time are to cut out Flash and to keep your content short, sweet and to the point.  Eliminating fluff will allow visitors to get the information they need quick and fast. Location You also need to decide if you are going to create a new web page for your mobile site, or if you would rather use a sub-domain of your current site. Either option is fine, it just depends on your preference.  Using a sub-domain does seem to be easier to set up, but there are also companies who can do the hard work for you. For wordpress.org sites, there is a plugin that is great for anyone who may not be familiar with CSS and HTML—Wptouch.  Which, “allows you to customize many aspects of its [your websites] appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to your iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini mobile, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm visitors without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.” For the more technical savvy marketer (or if you have a web designer on hand) Mobify is a great option.  Mobify offers both a free service and a paid service.  Some of the features they boast are real-time mobile version of your site, optimization of images, styles and advertising. HTML5 HTML5 is also shaping up to be a great option for mobile. The iPhone for example (well Apple products in general) do not support Flash.  HTML5 solves this problem by using a video tag that supports video files.  HTML5 is currently being implemented slowly by programmers and browsers are starting to support the new code.  If you are not familiar with HTML5, talk with your programmer and see if it is an option for you. Testing You may have been using a smartphone for a few years now, but not everyone is jumping on the smartphone bandwagon.  Make sure when you are testing your mobile site that it functions well on both smartphone and other mobile devices.  This will ensure you are keeping the window open for everyone browsing. Think about why your clients would go online to view your site.  Is it for information, sales reminders or how to locate your office/store?  Making your site useful and easy to navigate will make customers happy and a give you a great ROI. < Prev   Next >