Is your site mobile ready?

March 19, 2015 10:00 am

Here is a little lesson in math and marketing . . .

  • the average smartphone user checks their phone up to 221 times per day
  • 90% of American adults have a cell phone
  • 58% of American adults have a smartphone
  • more than 50% of mobile phone users access their phones as their primary means of going online 
  • 74% of mobile consumers will wait only 5 seconds for a page to load before they abandon the site           (Pew Research Center)

Given these statistics on smartphone ownership, usage and buying behavior, there is one big question all website designers and marketers should ask themselves.  “Is our site mobile ready?”

Gone are the days of the singular means to access the internet at home on the desktop.  All one needs to do is take a step outside during their lunch hour to see business people, moms, teens, and everyone in between hooked on their smartphones for texting, browsing their favorite social media and, of course, researching the best deals to buy off the internet. With the rapid emergence of the mobile web has come an increasing need for mobile websites and compatibility.  Here are a few points that you may want to consider with your website design team while you are scrambling to get your site mobile ready.

Do your homework –

  • Research what the experts are saying about Mobile-Friendly Websites.  Google sent notices and created a guide (Google’s Guide to becoming mobile ready) in January 2015, warning webmasters of errors in mobile capability on websites.  We may even eventually see a new algorithm for searches dependent upon the readiness of a site to handle mobile features.
  • You may also want to read The Mobile Usability Report which will explain areas where your site suffers severe mobile usability issues and provide you with steps to fix the problems. For example, the report looks at text size that can be read on smaller screens, mobile-compatable software, and spacing of lionks and buttons appropriately for easy use.
  • Check out your website on different devices. Try the mobile emulator from Google to see how your web site looks on a number of mobile devices.

Responsive Design –

Mobile devices alone account for over 4000 different screen sizes. Add to this computer screens and TVs and it’s easy to wonder how a site can look good across different devices. Responsive design is the answer to this problem. This type of flexible design makes it easier to read, easier to navigate and, most importantly, keeps customers on your site. Using a mix of flexible grids and layouts, images and an intelligent use of CSS media queries, responsive design can adjust to the correct size and format depending upon the device.  If you are tech savvy  you may want to read the seminal article that ‘invented’ the technique, Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte from Alist Apart Magazine for web designers. With more than 1.2 billion people accessing the web via mobile devices, having a mobile content strategy is no longer optional; it is critical.

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