How to Create a Website That’s Friendly to Your Mobile Users

By 2015, every person on earth will own a mobile device! As the usage of mobile devices continues to increase, mobile marketing brings potential opportunities to grow a business. Retailers and marketers should, therefore, gear up to create websites that could enhance the experience of mobile users. Unless you are ready to incorporate mobile content marketing into your business plan, you can never expect to get ahead of the competition.

Given below are some important pieces of advice, tips and suggestions that you can use to create a mobile-friendly website.

A Quick Look: Traditional YouTube Website vs It’s Mobile Version

Before we start discussing the various essential aspects of a mobile-friendly website, let’s have a look at how YouTube has optimized their content to cater to the requirements of their mobile audience. At the very first glance, you’ll be able to notice what YouTube has done on their mobile website. The first thing they have focused on is the selection of content for mobile users. The mobile version of YouTube website features only those pieces of content that’s in tune with what a mobile user would actually want to do.

To make their mobile-friendly website extremely functional, YouTube has minimized the quantity of content. The navigation of the mobile website is very clean, which enhances the ease browsing. For users who want to browse videos, YouTube features an app that does the job quite efficiently.

There are many more examples that you can have a look at. For best practices and guidelines, you should check out the mobile websites of Mashable, CNN, CBS News, Walmart, Nike, Amazon etc.

So, How Do You Need to Proceed?

While designing a website for your mobile audience, you need to optimize the content very efficiently. If you’re using too much flash on your website, you need to move away from it. Since Apple products can’t recognize flash, you should use either HTML 5 or JavaScript to display animated objects or videos. The next important thing that marketers need to consider is the use of images. It’s obvious that resizing an image affects its original quality. If you don’t want to resize the images, it’s best to remove most of the images or downsize product images, according to your specific requirements.

In addition, a mobile website should always have a clean navigational structure. This is even more important if you have an e-commerce website. You can enhance the user’s shopping experience only when you provide them the ease of navigation. That’s why you need to adopt a different approach.

Here are some tips that you’ll need to design a mobile-friendly website –

• Make sure your mobile site loads quickly
• Simplify the navigational structure
• Ensure the mobile site is accessible via all mobile devices
• Focus on enhancing the visibility for readers
• Put the most important information at the top of page
• Get straight to the point
• Make it easy for users to contact you
• Redirect mobile users from your website to the mobile version
• Provide consumers with local information

Don’t Ignore User Feedback

Perfecting the art (and science) of mobile content marketing will definitely take some time. Considering the speed at which mobile internet is growing, you should start paying some serious attention to mobile marketing. In any case, you need to have some patience, test and optimize. And the best idea to create mobile-optimized content is to ask users what they are actually looking for. User feedback has real power!

Do you have a mobile-friendly website? Please feel free to share your views, experiences and tips on mobile content marketing.