Don’t Forget Your Mobile Website
Ever since the arrival of Apple’s iPhone, the upward spiral of the numbers of people using a mobile device or a smartphone to search, find and view information on the internet has continued to gather pace.
Just last month in the UK, the Office for National Statistics published their finding for internet usage for the year 2010.
Unsurprisingly, access to the internet continues to increase at a rapid rate in people’s homes, but what is really striking is the rapid increase in mobile internet usage.
If your business, charity, club or organisation is being searched for, or being checked out, then there’s a fair chance that this is happening on a mobile device.
In fact the key findings for the UK are
- 45 per cent of Internet users used a mobile phone to connect to the Internet
- 6 million people accessed the Internet over their mobile phone for the first time in the previous 12 months
- The use of wireless hotspots almost doubled in the last 12 months to 4.9 million users
So it is time now to really get to grips with making sure that you are not turning away almost 50% of your website visitors by presenting them with a website that
- simply will not load (flash on an iPhone anyone?)
- needs “pinch and zoom” to navigate large pages of content
- loads oversized images slowly
- doesn’t make full use of inbuild apps on the smartphone like Google Maps
- doesn’t make it easy for your customers to contact you through the “click to call” feature on most smartphones
All the major high street stores are now spending fortunes making sure that their websites are optimsed for mobile, and with Google’s recent aquisition of Motorola Mobile surely this is a wake up call for ALL businesses of all shapes and sizes that your “virtual business card” can now be on everyone’s smartphone and in everyone’s pocket – as long as your website is optimised for mobile.
With this in mind a new service has been launched where you can quickly order up an optimised for mobile website and have all the features you need to make sure your products and services are connecting fully with the rapidly growing mobile phone website browsers out there.
We are very proud and excited to announce the launch of our Mobile Web Design service where we will rapidly prepare and configure a new website specifically for mobile viewing. We can also host this new site and offer a free .mobi domain name should you need one. Alternatively, we can build in the mobile website into a full website design should you wish to refresh your main website too.
To mark the launch of www.myweb4mobiles.co.uk and to thank you for visiting our site, we are offering 15% discount on a new mobile website design. Simply use the coupon : 15-off at the checkout.
Mobile Web Design – Now Three Times Bigger
With the news that Google recently purchased Motorola’s Mobile Phone technology and patents, we can see that the search engine giant now views the importance of the mobile phone and mobile web browser as part of their business development.
There are now thought to be three times more smartphones browsing and searching on the internet than standard PCs and Laptops. It’s there for critical for all businesses to understand why their web presence simply needs to be “mobile friendly” .
With the selection of smart phones and tablets increasing in the market place along with the number of people now using them, the need for proper mobile phone web site design and development also expands. The industry of mobile phone applications is likewise expanding substantially. It has been observed that a lot of the methods which were being used for conventional web site design are also getting used with mobile web site design with very poor results.
Test YOUR website using this link : Test Your Mobile Web Site
Many of the critical problems that show up when dealing with mobile website design tend to be the variations within the dimensions of the display screen. Mobile friendly web design today still is suffering from user friendliness and interoperability problems.
Functionality issues are complicated because of the small actual physical size of the smartphone form factors. Interoperability issues arise in the platform fragmentation of mobile phones, portable operating systems and mobile web browsers. These are generally a couple of the toughest challenges when conducting web design with the mobile web.
As the general public become more and more mobile browser enabled, it is surely the time to be assesing whether any existing web sites for your business, restaurant, hotel, club or charity can be viewed clearly on these smart phones and tablet devices.
Remember, many devices will not display any flash elements and simply leave gaping holes in your web pages and if your page is crammed full of content, not everyone wishes to use the pinch and zoom feature, just to find your contact details.
Thankfully mobile web designs are now available from My Web Care and we will be launching a new site dedicated to this service in the very near future.
Design Tips For Mobile Web Sites
Designing Your Mobile Website
Designing a website that is to be viewed on mobile phones needs planning, not just around the content (text, images and other content types) that will display on the website and the website’s structure (links and pages), but likewise about the technologies and file types to be utilised.
Many mobile phone browsers do not display Adobe Flash based sites, and any images ought to be small enough to be viewed on the screen.
Here are some tips to help you optimise your website for mobile device viewing.
- Use a dot mobi domain name to host your mobile website. The dot mobi (.mobi) extension for web site addresses was created for mobile websites. Nonetheless, the extension is more expensive to purchase than the average dot com address, and mobile devices will display dot com web sites as well as dot mobi.
- Keep the graphics to a minimal. If you don’t need to use an picture on your site, don’t do so. This is because it takes a long while to load the images on the mobile device. Most mobile users are in a hurry when looking for info on a mobile device and don’t want to wait for pictures to load up. If you really must show an picture on your site, be certain that the image does not surpass 480 pixels wide.
- Simply converting a dynamic web site to mobile standard without generating a separate, scaled down variant can result in disorderly, slow pages.
- Highlight the mobile version of your site. On your main site, make sure to include a link to the mobile version clearly at the top of the page.
Just always bear in mind that as you create websites, besides having useful content, the display must be accessible and convenient for your audience.
If you’d like us to create and host your mobile website, then contact us today and we will take care of it all for you.