Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

My husband gave me an iPad as a wedding gift. I thought it was pretty cool. I had no idea how much I would use it for my job.

I take my iPad with me everywhere. I do not have an iPhone, or even a smartphone. The thought of reading emails (and sending them) from something that fits in your jeans pocket makes my eyes hurt. My husband reads the news on his iPhone in bed, holding it so close to his eyes that the phone practically touches the tip of his nose. This is ridiculous to me.

But the iPad—now that’s different. I work on an iMac at home. I’m glued to my desk without a laptop. My iPad is less than a laptop and more than a phone. I love it. And when I read this post by Jason Falls on social media explorer on what mobile optimization does for your website, I listened.

I am now a mobile device user—and there are many of us out there. People are visiting websites, buying stuff, and reading news and blogs on our mobile devices more than ever.

Gone are the days of having to sit in front of your computer that had an internet connection to surf the web. People do it on the bus, in the waiting room at their dentists’ office, and even during dinner out with friends and family.

What freelancers need to realize is that if their website is not optimized to be viewed on tablets and smartphones, they are missing out on capturing a growing audience.

Updating your site for mobile optimization can be easy or hard, depending on the content management system you use. If your site is built with WordPress or another open-source content management systems, you can find a plug-in that will showcase your site on mobile devices. Some people will have to completely redesign their site for mobile optimization. Which person are you?

Regardless of how you attack optimizing for mobile devices, you’re going to want to do it for a lot of reasons, the least of which is illustrated in the following chart, the number of unique visitors navigating Social Media Explorer from mobile devices in the last two months of 2011. —social media examiner

Even with our meager, niche audience on SME, our mobile traffic has increased by 285 visitors per day. That’s 104,000 visitors per year and we haven’t really even pushed the tablet or mobile offerings.

While launching something on the web is not a matter of “if you build it, they will come,” when you add mobile optimization to an existing property, they will. –social media examiner

When considering design options for your mobile optimization, think about the content your user is looking for. Mobile browsers simply do not have enough space for all of the awesome content you provide on your site—especially if it is graphics heavy.

You don’t want your users to be annoyed with the difficulty of navigating your site on their mobile device. Use large navigation buttons so it’s easy to click through with your finger. Not being able to easily click through a website on my iPad is frustrating…and to be honest, a real turn off.

By giving your audience a better experience via their mobile device, you are, in effect, driving more traffic to your website. Who doesn’t want to drive more traffic to their website?

Do some research by taking a look at your favorite websites on your computer, then on your own mobile device. What do they do differently? How is the mobile version presented? Does it work or not? Take what you learn and use it for your own mobile optimization…and good luck!

Photo credit: Some rights reserved by xilius.