Does your company have a mobile website?
A mobile website is almost essential to receiving traffic today. Consumers are on the go and use their mobile devices for everything: calling, texting, banking and purchases. Having a mobile website could be a significant advantage to your company’s success. Of course you are probably thinking – I have a website…doesn’t it show up on a smartphone? Yes it does; however, it must be mobile friendly in order to work successfully. Let’s take a closer look at what a mobile website should embody.
A mobile website should be user friendly on all accounts just like your regular website. Users should navigate with ease and all the content should be there. From a design perspective, the usual culprit to a website not translating well from desktop to mobile is the structure. Your website should convert when accessed from a mobile device. To make it easy for web designers, Google offers a great guideline for developing a mobile device optimized website.
As you know Google’s words are gold, other search engines will support these recommendations as well. Google supports three design configurations for a mobile website: responsive design, dynamic serving, or a separate mobile site. Your company’s webmaster should use the responsive design. It’s highly recommended by Google because it serves the same HTML code for one URL for all devices. It uses CSS media queries to better determine how the content appears for the mobile user. This version rules out the redirects. (We all know how Google feels about redirects.) Responsive design also saves the information for the site and Google’s crawlers.
Dynamic serving differs from the responsive design in that it serves different HTML codes for one URL. The mobile content is consider hidden in your coding, so the Google bot has to find it and make it mobile compatible. The third option is to build a mobile website completely separate from your main site. This creates a redirect usually to a URL with an “m” such as m.trueitpros.com instead of trueitpros.com. This will have redirects as it depends upon the user agent.
There are other design aesthetics that should happen when making a mobile website. With any web design you want to keep it simple and be concise. Users don’t want to read a ton of content on your main site, so really don’t to read it while on the go. Think about the context and make sure all the important navigation pieces are there: click-to-call, services, about us, email, etc. Also make sure your brand is still properly represented. Lastly make sure you test the mobile website on a tablet, iPad, iPhone and Android device to make sure it looks good and is fully functional.
trueITpros has some of Atlanta’s best web designers in-house. Call us if you need a mobile website form your business. We’ll make sure you’re found online.