How many times have you tried to access a site from your smartphone and found that it’s difficult to navigate, loads slow, and is simply not as great an experience as viewing the same site on your desktop? This can be especially irritating when you’re trying to read something on the site and you find that you either need microscopic lenses on your eyes or have to zoom in and then scroll back and forth from left to right in order to make it through the ordeal.
If you’re a business owner, think about your visitors’ experiences. Will they enjoy interacting with your site on a smartphone? Will all of your navigational elements (like drop-down menus) work properly? Are there other features that break or are difficult to interact with on a smaller screen?
Why should I care?
Official statistics say that mobile usage accounts for anywhere from 13% to 25% of all internet traffic. Now add to that the fact that mobile usage has generally doubled every year since 2008. Make no mistake: The future of your website is directly tied to its overall mobile responsiveness.
You only get one chance to make a first impression on a customer. In many cases, you get less than 10 seconds to reach out and grab your visitors’ attention. If they don’t immediately like what they see, they’ll often leave your site, find one of your competitors, and forget about you entirely. To make matters worse, you risk alienating existing customers when you have a site that’s not mobile-optimized.
So what do I do about it?
In order to solve this problem, it’s important to give mobile visitors an alternative to viewing the same version of your site as they would see on their desktop. This site will have a more concise message and will make it easier for users to get to what they most want to see. Your website also must be capable of detecting either the screen size or what type of device visitors are using and present them with the correct version.
As you’re having a mobile version of your site built, there are a number of important principles to keep in mind:
1. Eliminate content. No one likes to read tomes of information on any website, let alone on their phone. Make your content as concise as possible. The same principle applies when you’re collecting information. Collect as little as possible—like a name and an e-mail address—rather than making someone fill out an entire 7-page application using their phone’s mini-keyboard.
2. Size your site properly so that people can view your content easily without having to zoom in or scroll back and forth.
3. Make sure that all the elements of your site interact well with tap functionality as opposed to clicks. Make your buttons and navigation elements big and easy to press. Check to make sure your drop-down menus and other interactive elements work properly.
4. Take advantage of mobile-only features like GPS-assisted localization, click-to-talk phone numbers, etc.
Want to learn more about adding a mobile presence to your website? Contact us for your free one-hour phone consult and we’ll be happy to take your site to the next level.
When hiring a web developer to build your site, don’t work with someone who can’t help you build a mobile presence alongside your site’s regular format. If you’d like to take this conversation to the next level, contact us to discuss how to optimize your website for mobile users.