Optimizing Your Site For Mobile Friendliness: How And Why Should You Do It

The mobile Internet is becoming an ever larger slice of the entire web use pie and as of 2012, over 1 billion of the world’s 4 billion phones are web capable smart phones, either connected to 3G or 4G networks or able to access the web through a Wi Fi connection when it’s available.

Furthermore, as of 2012, there were an estimated 1.1 billion mobile broadband subscriptions active among the world’s mobile users. In fact, many sources estimate that by 2014, more of the planet’s web traffic will be flowing through mobile web sources than from desktop use.

What all these eye-opening statistics really mean to you and most webmasters, online marketers or web based sellers is that mobile simply can’t be ignored.

If anything, running a website with no mobile optimization will ensure that within three years or slightly more will result in your online presence become drastically marginalized at a damaging business cost.

You need to make sure your website is optimized not only for fully functional mobile viewing but also for mobile search and responsiveness to all portable device platforms and browsers. Luckily, this isn’t that hard or that expensive to do, depending on how you go about it and how old your existing site is.

Let’s get down to some details.

A Few Ground Rules

Pay Attention to the Latest Tech Trends

As you optimize your site for mobile viewing and search and afterwards, keep in mind that this is an evolving game and no web technology stays static.

In essence, just as you originally optimized your site for mobile friendliness, you should also keep doing this at a reasonably regular basis - maybe once a year - checking to see what the latest updates in the field can give you and your customers in terms of user friendliness and compatibility.

A good idea when it comes to keeping up with the latest trends is to stay tuned into the major online publications that deal with mobile apps, mobile web development and the latest in smart phone friendly ecommerce options.

General magazines like Wired can be slightly useful but the really meaty info is something you’re going to find in more niche oriented pages like the site of the L2 Think Tank.

Keep An Eye on your Competition

Don’t obsess over what your competitors are doing but at least keep a watchful eye on them to see if they’re moving too far ahead of you in serving their readers and clients to the best of their abilities.

Also, it’s a good idea to look at competitors’ websites and mobile platforms so that you can keep an eye out for useful ideas and interface changes that you too can adapt or even adapt and improve on in your own special way.

Use Mobile Apps if the Opportunity Comes Along

A major, and we mean major, component of the entire mobile web experience is found in the vast marketplace for mobile apps.

The exact quantity of these little software downloads is hard to calculate but Apple’s iTunes and the Google Android Marketplace alone contain at least a bit over 1 million mobile applications for sale or free download.

Aside from the fact that a mobile app version of your website is a great way to integrate with the mobile web as a whole, you can also brainstorm up additional apps that provide useful services and tools to your readers as part of a promotional download for visiting your pages through their smart phones, tablets or even desktop computers.

Watch your Mobile Stats

As you integrate your pages with mobile search and viewing capacity, you’ll also need to keep track of your data analytics to make sure the whole process is running smoothly and gaining some traction with your fans and followers.

You can do exactly this by signing up to a good mobile analytics package and connecting it to your site or app itself. There are numerous services that can do this for you at varying costs ranging from completely free to a couple dozen bucks per month or less.

One great tool is the Google Analytics program; formerly devoted strictly to website stats analysis, it now also provides an excellent, highly comprehensive series of measuring tools that’s called Mobile Apps Analytics, which let your track everything from mobile website apps downloads to viewing experience by percentage of users to in-app purchases for anything you might be selling through the application version of your website.

Mobilizing your Site

Alright, we’ve gone over some of the ground rules, now how about the actual mechanics of getting your desktop website nice and mobile? Well, this has luckily become easier than ever and is constantly moving further along that same path. Here are some options you can try out.

Responsive Design

If you don’t have much of a website yet and want to get it up and running quickly, this is probably the best possible option for you. Responsive design consists of a series of design language protocols that enable a newly built website to automatically adjust to any screen size or pixelation it’s viewed through.

This almost magical design innovation is especially useful in that it lets web pages built or rebuilt through it keep their existing sidebar menus and numerous other rich features that are commonly found on conventional desktop websites.

Creating a responsive design site is probably the ultimate solution (at least for now) in mobile friendliness, since it means creating just a single site for all platforms and letting whatever optimization for search or social media that the site gains stay concentrated on a single URL.

However, you should keep in mind if you already have a normal website that’s maybe even been around since way back in the 90’s and uses conventional coding in its design, converting it to a responsive format is an absolutely major overhaul.

Thus, in this case, your best bet is to both get right down to rebuilding and for the meantime keeping a separate mobile page ready for your smart phone/tablet using viewers.

An M Dot Domain

A great temporary mobile option or its own long term platform for your mobile presence; an m dot domain is essentially a separate URL domain that applies strictly to mobile viewing platforms and redirects from your regular website as soon as a viewer accesses it through a non-desktop machine.

M dot domains aren’t a small trend either and many major players online operate through them when visited through mobile platforms –Facebook being one example.

However, if your site isn’t already insanely famous and known by hundreds of millions of viewers, M dot may be problematic in that it creates two separate optimization profiles for Google or other search engines to consider.

This could cause some problems if one domain drops in popularity or has problems and causes the other to go down with it.

Mobile Optimized Templates

Maybe the easiest, most webmaster friendly option of all for making your web pages mobile friendly is to simply change them over to a pre-built mobile template.

If your existing desktop site is already hosted over top of a heavy duty CMS platform like WordPress, TypePad or Drupal, switching it to a device friendly template is as easy as switching themes and doing a bit of content editing so that everything nicely fits together.

Many of these Content Management Systems have numerous mobile design themes already available either for free (in some cases) or for a small download price. By integrating any one of these themes, you can literally have your CMS based site ready for the new internet viewing age in as little a single day or even less.

Even if your web pages aren’t hosted over top of WordPress or some other CMS, you can still go for instant mobile templates by buying HTML5 versions of them from numerous design companies and having a programmer integrate them with your domain inside your hosting control panel.

These non CMS themes are a lot pricier than an $8 WordPress or Drupal theme, but they deliver what are essentially the same results as creating a whole responsive design website straight from scratch as discussed in option one.

Marty Reardon writes for Next Door Self Storage. When Marty is not working or writing, he spends his down time reading about the latest trends in web design and blogging.