Easily Make Your Website Compatible with Mobile Devices (iPhone, iPad, tablet, Android, WAP, Smartphone, Symbian and everything in between)
Posted by Sensible Marketing | Posted in internet, internet marketing guides, mobile marketing, online behavior profiling, online marketing, online mrketing, tubemogul, video sharing, video testimonials, Web 2.0, web analysis, web analytics, web design software, web marketing, web reporting, web site analysis, web traffic analysis, web traffic statistics, webmaster tools, website design, website optimization, website statistics, website visitor behavior, website visitors, webtrends analytics | Posted on 14-08-2011
Tags: Android, blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Mobile Devices, mobile website, Smartphone, Symbian, tablet, WAP
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If you are considering building a mobile application or mobile website over the next year, there are a few best practices which you can work into your website re-design process which will make moving to mobile much easier. Below, I’ve put together four key elements which will prepare you for the mobile transition.
Be prepared for RSS Feeds
When you are creating a mobile website or app, we always suggest setting it up in such a way that once you post a new article to your website, it automatically appears on the mobile side as well. Such a setup ensures that adding a mobile presence won’t double the amount of work for your marketing team. The main method for creating these type of automatic updates is by using RSS feeds.
When re-designing your site, map out any section which has frequently changing content (i.e. publications, recent news, press releases, ect.) and make sure you have an easy method for creating RSS feeds for each of these sections. You could even take this a step further and create RSS feeds for this content right from the outset.
RSS feeds are quite common for major media websites and there will be visitors to your website who will appreciate receiving your latest updates in the RSS format. The only point to remember here is make sure your feeds contain the full article and not just a summary of the content with a link to the article. Summary RSS feeds will not work for mobile as they do not give the mobile app enough information to re-create the full article in the app.
Limit PDF Based Content
Many professional service firms are stuck with using PDFs as there is a certain segment of their audience who like having print formatted content. However, the demands of readers are quickly changing and the challenge with having too much PDF content on your website is that it does not translate well to the mobile web. On most older Blackberry devices, the phone of choice for many professionals, PDFs simply will not open. For newer Blackberries, iPhone and Android users PDFs will open but it will be difficult to read the information. Reading PDFs on these small screens require a lot of zooming and scrolling left to right which will frustrate users.
The best solution is to accommodate both sets of users. When you’re planning how to display PDF content, make sure to include a brief extract of the document in HTML format and then link to the PDF. Following this hybrid approach will satisfy both groups of users.
Put Video Content on Youtube
The benefit of putting all of your video content on Youtube is that it is the most common online video platform on the planet and is thus supported by almost every modern mobile device. Distributing video to mobile devices can be quite difficult but Youtube has done the hard work to make video work on most devices.
I’ve found that Youtube is most helpful when it comes to distributing content to Blackberry devices. These devices require a specific technology called an RTSP stream to playback video. These streams are normally quite costly and difficult to maintain, so taking advantage of Youtube saves time and expense.
Start Tracking Mobile Usage…TODAY!
Even if you are not going to be launching your mobile initiative until later this year, you should still be measuring how many people are visiting your site from mobile devices. Measuring mobile visits can be done using free tools like Google Analytics. If your current analytics program does not measure mobile visits, you may want to have your IT staff also add Google Analytics tracking to your site. It’s free and is widely regarded as one of the best Analytics programs in the industry. Finding mobile information is different for every analytics program but you should be able to find a mobile tab which will help you identify which mobile devices your visitors are using. In Google Analytics, this information can be found by going to Mobile and Mobile Devices under the Visitors section. Having this information will help you to determine which platforms you should target with mobile apps and websites once you start into your mobile initiative.
