Rule #1 — Keep it simple by focusing on the most important content for your customers, and make it easy to access this stuff. These potential customers are on-the-go, often in the middle of texting while driving, reading their facebook friends’ updates, or checking their email. They don’t want to have to search three other websites just to find your location or phone number.
Don’t overload mobile pages with heavy content. Although these mobile phone zombies are willing to risk lives for even the dumbest mobile conversations, they are not going to wait more than a few seconds if you don’t even have your phone number on your mobile website. Easy navigation with fast-loading pages means happy customers, which means more business.
Build your mobile website around the capabilities of mobile devices. The typical mobile device has very specific mobile functionality, especially unique types of user interactions like touching the screen instead of clicking. And unless the person hasn’t paid their cell phone bill, mobile phones have the easy capability to make a phone call. If they are looking for a business on their mobile phone, they are often more likely to call that business.
Ensure your mobile website visitors can easily push a “call button” to call your business or click a “map button” to help them easily find your business location. Complex scripts or drop-down navigation or complicated overlays are not going to work on many devices so use buttons that even big fingers can press without frustration.
Design your mobile site to look good on the smaller mobile display. Mobile devices have pixel-dense visual displays. The pixel space or resolutions are huge, but the screens are tiny. Text and images on mobile screens often look much smaller (and sometimes sharper) than they appear on your desktop. To make it even tougher, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of different screen sizes, resolutions, and viewports. Testing on various devices and emulators is critical before launching a mobile website.
Keep your mobile content updated and be open to new ideas. Don’t forget that the mobile web is evolving quickly. The latest craze in mobile web marketing is geo-targeting and personalized mobile ad campaigns. Many business owners are finally learning what the NSA has known for years, that users interact through location on their mobile device. Most mobile devices have GPS capability with location awareness. Just imagine being able to deliver a location-specific ad or message to that same potential customer who visited your website last week and is now walking or driving by your store. Since they have already shown they are interested in your brand, this is powerful retargeting.
Finally, change, change, change and optimize, optimize, optimize. Change is a constant in everything, and happens especially fast when it comes to web development and smartphone technology. Best practices continually evolve as technology integration advances and expands. Don’t forget to add analytics to your mobile website to evaluate and improve your site’s performance and your users’ experience.
By keeping it simple and focusing on what’s most important to your mobile website users, you will find it can be very rewarding to your business in return.