Mobile Websites How Important Are They

IvyGB

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Dec 15, 2011
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www.myemobilesite.com
All I have been hearing and seeing recently is related to Mobile device friendly sites. How important is it to have a mobile friendly site? What if you don't know anything about the coding to build a mobile site?
 
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Well, as luck would have it, there are some fairly easy things you can do to assure a more mobile-friendly site.
Install a mobile plugin

If you are using WordPress, you can transform your site into a mobile-friendly version in about 30 seconds with a simple plugin.
There are a lot of these plugins out there, but as Brian recommended, WP Touch is a great place to begin. It’s free, and you can customize it in several ways to best suit your site.

Oh and one other thing about mobile versions of your site. Make sure you give readers the choice of viewing the standard site as well.
There are options in each plugin to do this. There are times when readers will want to view the full website, depending on their device and internet speed.
Note: before you install and activate any plugin, make sure your site has been properly backed up.
Create smart navigation

How’s your site navigation?
Creating smart, thorough navigation for your website is a key aspect to making your site mobile friendly.
Make sure you offer readers clear and distinct ways to get to your most important content.
For example, do you see the red tabs along the top of this site? Those are examples of links to cornerstone content. Not only are they great ways to attract traffic, but they are perfect examples of clear navigation.

Write clear content

Now more than ever, you need to grab reader attention instantly.
When your site is being viewed on a much smaller screen, make sure you have compelling headlines that let the reader know she’s going to have a great experience reading this content.
Clear content that gets right to the point also assures readers can digest your material on their mobile devices, even while they’re distracted and busy.
Don’t use too many images

I’ve been guilty of this one. And I’ve also noticed in my analytics that when I include a lot of images in a particular article, I get less traffic reading it on mobile devices.
Lately, I have been limiting my use of images to one or two, and now my articles are getting read more by those with mobile devices.
Images are a great way to get a point across or break up text, but just try to imagine someone reading your content on a really slow connection with a tiny little screen. It might mean you don’t need that 20th image after all.
Notice that Copyblogger has, for most types of content, always had just one single, attention-getting image per post.
Don’t rely on Flash or Javascript

All arguments aside about the relevance of Flash, it is generally a safe bet that not all mobile devices will be able serve up either of these technologies.
Even if they do, it tends to be an extra step or two to actually view the content. The best practice is to stick with plain (X)HTML/CSS standards.
Practice good design

In the non-mobile web version of your site, it might be easier to get away with a few design problems that are far more visible and obvious in the mobile version.
Keep in mind the whitespace around paragraphs and words. If your content is so cramped that it makes readers physically uncomfortable, they might not hang out for very long.
Making your content scannable and breaking up long blocks of text is great for all readers, but even more so for mobile readers.
And cluttered, visually busy sites are hard enough to read on a large screen. Don’t ask mobile readers to go there!
So there are several ways you can begin making your website content more mobile friendly. Get started on a few of these and you will be way ahead of the competition.
(If you’re not sure where to start, the best payoff for the least amount of effort is probably getting a mobile plugin for WordPress like WP Touch.)
 
Just checked out the official site. Here are a few things to add:

It has a free version too on Wordpress.org
It supports adsense (good news to all those people looking for the ways of money)
It has 3 different paid versions starting from 39 to 200$ (if you want to be grateful to the creators)

I'm surely gonna test it in my own blogs, already downloaded the free version! (:D)

Thanks for sharing all this information which I had never known of previously.
 
I was looking at all the hype and thinking mobile was a fad, but looking at the stats on my sites, which so far have totally ignored mobile, I'm seeing 10% of traffic from mobile browsers. I'm going to begin to add the plugins when time permits.
 
In the past year my mobile traffic went from 4% to 16%. Added a mobile version of 2 of my big producers and instantly saw a good spike in conversions. I got with the product vendors to create their own mobile sites and saw another spike. When a mobile user gets a mobile site from pitch to purchase it definitely helps increase conversions dramatically.