Is Your Website a Smartphone Friendly Website?
The use of Smartphones is on the rise. And unfortunately a lot of businesses are paying no attention to this increase.
Recently, a leading research company stated that in 3-4 years, mobile users will be greater in number than laptops or computers. While mobile users obviously encompass more than just Smartphones, this outlines the importance of making your site mobile ready.
The reality is, you can’t target Smartphone browsers like regular internet users. Since the screens are smaller than laptops, you have to make your website smaller to accommodate them. If you don’t, the smaller screen will force the mobile users to constantly scroll up or down to view anything.
Most people will not be willing to do this, and will simply click away. Therefore, not having a smaller version of your site can cost you sales.
Should you have two different pages for this? You could do this option, but then you would have to get two separate pages ranking in the search engines. This is almost impossible, so is not really an option.
Another method is to have a clickable link on your main page that goes to your mobile page. However, this is going to reduce conversions because a certain percentage of people are not going to click through.
Therefore, the best strategy is to utilize user agent detection. This is a system that finds out what browser the visitor is using, and adjusts the webpage accordingly.
This means the site will automatically change the dimensions of the webpage based on the browser of the visitor. This is when your ability to target Smartphone users will really take off.
What about your page content?
Now that you know how to change your dimensions, you have to have quality content. The main thing needed is simplicity. This is how to target mobile users successfully. Here are three ways to make it more simple:
#1) Have the same navigation on every page
This is important, because if there is different navigation the user will become frustrated and leave.
#2) Put the navigation lower on the page
When it’s at the top, it often forces Smartphone users to have to toggle down to view the page. This is very annoying and a guaranteed way to lower your sales.
#3) Limit the use of graphics
This is another way to improve the simplicity. You probably want to avoid one of those annoying introductory flash pages that pops up before the main page.
So the most important things to keep Smartphone users in mind is to have different dimensions for mobile devices and keep your pages simple. Catering to this growing market is a smart move.
We actually utilize user agent detection on our website to present our website to the incoming internet mobile device. There are two reasons for this:
1. We only require one website URL for SEO purposes.
2. There are so many internet mobile devices now that trying to match the capabilities of the devices to the website formatting has to be completed easily.
We TOTALLY AGREE with your statement that user agent detection is the way to go because gone are the days of a .mobi one site fits all mentality.