This article was originally posted on the SocialMediaExaminer.com website on Oct 10, 2011.
Is your website meeting the needs of on-the-go mobile users?
When you’re developing your first mobile site, you may be at a loss. That’s understandable—a mobile website is an entirely different animal from a traditional website.
Given that, it’s important to keep some best practices in mind as you develop your mobile presence.
About Mobile Users
But before we dive into the 9 best practices, it’s important to keep one thing in mind—the person viewing your site is mobile.
That may seem like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised by how many people forget that simple truth.
When someone is mobile, they’re expecting an entirely different experience from the one they’ll get on your standard website.
For example, a mobile visitor is typically looking for a few key pieces of information: directions to your office, a click-to-call phone number or a map of your store locations. What they’re not looking for are lengthy staff bios, information about your corporate philosophy or PDFs of your latest press releases.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the 9 best practices for mobile website design that can help you create a site that puts your best foot forward.
#1: Simplify. Then Simplify Again. And Again
The first step in creating a mobile site is determining what content you’ll include. Given the restricted amount of screen space, it’s important to figure out what key pieces of information your visitors will probably be looking for.
A store locator? Probably. A “Contact Us” form with 13 different fields to fill out? Not so much.
It’s also important to keep the steps involved in going from entry point to purchase as simple as possible. Fandango does a great job of this by eliminating much of their non-essential content to quickly bring their consumers what they want: movie times.
Fandango does more than just provide a simple mobile web design—they provide a mobile ticket, too, thus completing the sales cycle.
Better still, Fandango completes the sales cycle by providing a QR code that acts as a mobile ticket for the purchaser. Just bring the phone to the theater and have them scan the code there—it acts as the purchaser’s ticket.
Subscribe to Our Blog
Join hundreds of people who get free and fresh content every week.
