Design your way

A mobile-optimized website is mainly about providing better user experience to mobile users, who are mostly assumed to be on the move. The main intent here is to ensure that several components are integrated to make your website optimized and accessible on mobile devices. Choose to use mobile-friendly options for your mobile landing page such as, jQuery, HTML5, and JPG and GIF image formats.

Most of you reading this article, certainly must be having your own website. And I’m sure you have taken appropriate steps to ensure that it drives good traffic and generates substantial leads for your business. But with smartphones and tablets driving the market, it has become indispensable for companies to optimize their website for the mobile.

Mobile-optimized website: An introduction

With more and more people using their smartphones and tablets these days to go online, optimizing your website for the mobile is an essential business strategy. Mobile-optimized website is mainly about providing better user experience to mobile users, who are mostly assumed to be on the move. The main intent here is to ensure that several components are integrated to make your website optimized and accessible on mobile devices.

Importance of Creating Mobile-optimized website

Mobile-optimized website is particularly a priority in e-commerce website, as it demands for better user experience – failing which you are sure to face shopping cart abandonment and consequently lose business. Here are a few instances as to how mobile-optimized websites can help improve business:

Mobile websites lead to (mobile) purchases. Surveys have revealed that mobile users while shopping are more likely to buy a product or service if your site is optimized for mobile. At the same time, three-fourth users have shown their enthusiasm to return to a mobile e-commerce site in the future – on the basis of good user experience.

Optimize your Mobile website, to avoid shopping cart Abandonment. There has been a significant percentage of shopping cart abandonment happening due to websites not being mobile-optimized, as majority of the users chose to move over to a mobile-friendly competitor site rather than switching back to a PC for viewing ‘the’ website on the web.

Poor mobile (website) user experience can mar brand reputation. Be careful about not tarnishing your brand reputation by offering bad user experience on mobile website that isn’t optimized for the web. Make your customers feel important by ensuring that you care for their user experience and get your website mobile-optimized.

Attributes of a Mobile-optimized Website

Short Headline

Cut your headline short to three or four words, instead of seven or eight word headline, so that it does not take much space of your mobile page. Also, keep your text content concise and clear.

Ensure Quick loading time

Make sure your mobile landing page loads quickly, in five seconds or less. With mobile users inherently being an impatient lot and basically on the move, slow loading are a huge deterrent, and may lead to ‘bounce’ if not catered to. One of the perfect ways to speed up your load time is to ensure that the data on your pages is under 20 kilobytes. Mobile users love to read content that is short, to the point and relevant. Bullet points are a great way to present content on mobile website.

Choose mobile-friendly options

Choose to use mobile-friendly options for your mobile landing page such as, jQuery, HTML5, and JPG and GIF image formats. One of the prime priorities here is to have your items scaled, so as to fit to your page. The best practice is to make sure that you do not have to zoom into the content on your page to read it; and if you have to do it, there is something wrong in it.

Add lots of white space

Most website when designed are crammed with over-stuffed information. However, a mobile optimized website calls for maximum white space – as it not only gives a cleaner and more sophisticated appearance, but also makes clicking the buttons easier.

Add ‘Click-to-call’ feature

Adding a ‘click-to-call’ button (including the international prefix number) on your landing page is a great way to generate leads and initiate conversation. At the same time make sure to show your availability ‘time’, so that you do not lose customers.

Have Content in Single Column

Make your content available on a single column. Try managing to have your call-to-action (CTA) located above the fold, located within the top 100 pixels for smartphones; however, if in case you cannot have your CTA above the fold, you can add a teaser to lead users to your CTA.

Be (Touch) Finger-friendly

Smartphones and tablet devices are all about ‘touch’. Make sure that your mobile website is optimized to be touch-friendly. Add sufficient padding around the clickable area/items so as to avoid mis-clicks.

Localize deals & offers

With most mobile users accessing mobile websites on the move, you can get your website mobile optimized by integrating geo-tracking systems into your website devices and offer deals and offers based on localized search – making your business more mobile-friendly and attractive.

Keep Registration forms simple

Mobile users like to keep their typing activity to the minimum when accessing website. Keep the registration process simple and avoid complex forms. Ask for the minimum information that is required to accomplish the job for which information is sought. Long forms are the common reason for increasing bounce rates and lower conversion rates in mobile websites.

Synopsis

Following the burgeoning increase in sales of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, creating mobile-optimized website have become integral to every business; while ensuring that users experience remains intact as in regular websites.

All you need to do is ensure that your website is easily accessible (opens) on mobile devices. This largely calls for saying ‘NO’ to Flash, frames, plug-ins, and PNG-24 images. Moreover, you need to avoid all those things that will impede the loading speed of your mobile website.

Is your website mobile-optimized?

Author Bio:

Hariot Mills is a mobile app developer associated with a leading iPad app development company. She also writes about the latest happenings that directly the mobile Application Development industry.