We just updated RDZ Media’s website with a new look. Every two years I get the urge to see a different look for the website and it’s been two years since the last update. However, this update was different because we also found ourselves planning on how the mobile website will look and function with the new look.
This update was our 1st time planning the mobile website along with the regular website and it was an eye opener. Often we came across a design that we liked however, when we applied the design to mobile it didn’t work well. At one point we were considering designing two separate websites one Internet based and a mobile website.
So what is a Mobile Website – A mobile website is a version of your website optimized for viewership on cell phones and smartphones. Mobile websites take advantage of utilizing smaller screen real estate and vertical scrolling or tapping to the screen to replace not having the function of a mouse. Mobile websites differentiate from standard websites in the fact that a mobile website is designed for the smaller handheld display and touch-screen interface.
Like any website, mobile websites can display text content, data, images and video. They can also access mobile-specific features such as click-to-call (to dial a phone number) or location-based mapping.
Our 1st mobile website was built after our last website design was up and running and we found that the best solution was to build a separate mobile website. This meant that we had two websites to maintain and we had to coordinate content on both platforms. We really did not want to go down that road again since we were starting from scratch.
The other question we answered was: is a mobile website really necessary? If you’re facing this question in your organization then I suggest that you look in your traffic log files for part of the answer. How much traffic does
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your website receive from mobile devices? Also look at the data on the growth of the mobile audience to see where your future traffic will be coming from. According to eMarketer more than 75% of the US population now subscribe to a mobile phone service, and nearly 114 million consumers are expected to access the internet via mobile this year. Your current Internet traffic numbers may not show a huge amount of mobile traffic yet but that can change very fast. If you’re planning on updating your website this year, then take the time and optimize it for mobile and be ready.
Here’s what we’ve learned from planning and implementing a mobile website along with our traditional website.
1. Make certain that mobile is apart of your marketing strategy. If your company is not focused on a mobile marketing strategy then a mobile website will not get the attention it deserves.
2. If you want to test the mobile waters, then consider a mobile landing page with several pages of your best content made available for mobile devices. This may work best if you have a large website and you’re not certain if all of your content is applicable to a mobile audience.
3. WordPress and Joomala makes it easy to implement a mobile version of your website as each platform have mobile optimized themes and plugins that can display your current content on mobile devices.
4. Optimize multimedia for mobile – We had to redo a number of our videos as they were originally encoded in Flash and Apple mobile products don’t display Flash. We also had a Flash based magazine that we had to rebuild so that it can be seen on Apple devices.
5. Navigation – Mobile browsers display navigation in a vertical manner which may make it difficult for users to navigate to sub pages. Create a mobile navigation menu where users can easily use vertical scrolling to access your deeper content.
6. Use an expert coder – WordPress is a great platform, however, no theme is going to display your content exactly as you want it on both platforms. We spent around 30 hours tweaking code to get our website to behave the way we want and we are still tweaking a few pages.
Using a mobile optimized theme saved us money. Using WordPress and a mobile optimized theme meant we did not have to register a .MOBI domain to direct mobile traffic to. The theme detects mobile browsers and serves the mobile version of the website. If you are planning on creating a separate mobile website you can create a subdomain and name it “M” Companies that do not want to register a .MOBI domain have been using this technique.
In the end we like our new site and its mobile companion.
If you are looking for more information on how to get started in mobile, we have a presentation for you. Our “Getting Started in Mobile” is a guide on what you need to know to start making mobile a successful part of your marketing campaigns. Download this FREE guide NOW!