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Mobile Friendly Web Design is Vital to Online Marketing Campaigns

The recent growth in the use of mobile devices like tablets and smart phones sees mobile web surfing set to surpass land line internet use by 2015. In fact a recent study by the Mobile Marketing Association of Asia found that while 4.8 billion people have a mobile phone while only 4.2 billion have a toothbrush! 55% of users access Twitter via their mobile devices and tablet users are more likely to research their purchases and often use the interactive features of web pages to explore them more deeply. These and many other statistics show that mobile internet usage is continuing to expand at breakneck speeds and so if your company website isn’t optimized for mobile visitors then you could be missing more than half of your online sales opportunities.

The main difference between mobile friendly web pages and standard pages is that the pages that are optimized for mobile devices have been greatly simplified. Usually they are made up of smaller pages with a lot less clutter on them to minimize their download times. Features like navigation bars are often moved to the bottom of pages to make them easier to use on phones and sidebars are left out to make a cleaner, easy to scroll through page. Internal links in the text are usually minimized to lessen the chance of inadvertently click on them and leaving the page as many devices don’t support tabbed pages. All of these modifications are aimed at producing a page that looks great on a smaller screen while also being easy to use but still has all of the vital information that visitors are looking for. Unless your webpage can deliver this kind of performance on a variety of mobile devices then your mobile visitors probably won’t stay and worse, the search engines won’t even bring your page up in the mobile optimized SERPs.

The usual solution is to create mobile friendly web pages in tandem with the standard pages designed to be viewed on PCs and laptops. This can be a time consuming and even confusing process, especially if you aren’t particularly computer savvy. Many web designers offer packages that include content management systems that update the differently configured versions of your site simultaneously. The growth in mobile users has also had an impact on the posts that are the most successful as copy that fits easily onto a mobile phone screen will necessarily have to be shorter than copy posted for viewing on PC screens.

Because of the technical differences between the two different formats for web pages it is vital to have an online marketing plan that incorporates mobile specific strategies that take advantage of the fact that mobile customers are often on the move. If your business relies on foot traffic to generate revenue this means including links to your Google Places page and special offers that are offered to mobile customers to increase the chance of them physically visiting your business. To make sure that your mobile web page is as user friendly as possible it is a good idea to look at how it displays on a variety of mobile devices and to stay ahead of the game by checking it out on new devices as they come onto the market.

Because the mobile web is evolving so rapidly at the moment this is one area where it is beneficial to get professional advice on how to configure your website for mobile devices. However you go about optimizing your online presence to be mobile device friendly it is a vital part of all online marketing now and if you don’t join the mobile internet now it is likely that you won’t even be in the same marketplace as your competitors who do.

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