On previous posts, we’ve mentioned that your navigation should be restricted to essential pages on mobile. However, you can still use navigation effectively. Here are a few examples from real YWD websites. Have a look at them on your mobile phone.
Large buttons appear horizontally right beneath the page banner, and links to sub-pages (if any) on rows underneath. YWD lets you choose the colour of the buttons, the font size, etc. If you only have very few pages in the top level of your mobile website, that’s a simple and effective option.
Vertical dropdown
When people tap on the little icon on top of the banner (alternatively, the word “Menu” can be used)...
As you can see, a website management system like Your Web Department provides different options in terms of mobile navigation without programming. This way you can easily match it to your specific needs.
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
Intuit put together this infographic, which is a great guide for your mobile website. Although we have no relationship with Intuit (we do use QuickBooks for accounting) we happen to agree with their points and have the same philosophical approach to mobile.
As it is mentioned on the graphic not caring about mobile equates to losing businesses. Just look at the stats in point number one:
55% of people who own a cell phone use their phone to go online
31% of mobile internet users say they mostly go online using their phone
57% of mobile web users wouldn't recommend a website they had trouble accessing on their phone
34% of mobile web users would visit a competitor's mobile website instead after a bad mobile experience
Point number two is dead on the money,YWD is just one of the many options available for creating a mobile version of your web site - “no code experience necessary”.
Point three and four are great reminders of design basics you should always keep in mind, your customers needs should be your primary focus (this goes for the desktop website version as well) a website is not for you, it is for your audience. Keep it simple and make sure what your visitors are looking for is easy to find.
Points five and six are about testing the different phones and adapting to changes. Today’s Android based phone and iPhones are the most popular, but this could change in the near future. Just think how fast we went from phones that did only text and email to what we have now. Who knows what the next medium would be, Google glasses?
A website and its mobile counterpart are a must for any business. There are no excuses for not having both, with YWD, you could have both a good desktop and a mobile website for less than what you spend on coffees.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
One of the reasons we developed Your Web Department was that we didn't like the fact that many people were being held hostage by web developers and that it should be easy to update and manage one's own website for gosh sakes. The other thing we really work hard to do is provide great support and not just technical support, if customers have questions on how to make their website better or how to make their business work better on the Internet, we're happy to tell them. If we have the answer you can ask the question.
A great reward for us is when one of our customers says something nice about us either in print or in video. It's especially nice when it's unsolicited.
Rona Birenbaum is a customer of ours. Her website, www.caringforclients.com has been on Your Web Department for several years and has gone through several iterations as her business evolved. So, have a listen to this interview about Rona's financial planning business. Great advice and a nice plug for YWD later in the video.
Paul Chato has been many things: a graphic designer, programmer, comedian, head of network TV comedy, game producer, 3D animator, playwright, event host, director and anything else that matches his fancy. Most of the time he is a managing partner at Your Web Department and is most excited about LiveBuild™. Check out LiveBuild
So you just went live with a new website for your business. Congratulations! Now you go to Google, search for it and... nothing. Oh, you must have typed something wrong, of course. You search for something more unique within the content and... nada. OK, this is starting to get on your nerves. You then search for the name of the website itself and... nothing again. What’s going on?
Your website needs to be indexed first
How does Google know about all those gazillions of websites out there? It relies on a piece of software called a Web crawler (also known as a Web spider). Google and all other search engines like Bing have their own crawlers that are constantly browsing the Web, identifying websites and automatically going through all their links and then indexing them. Google’s is called Googlebot.
Until your website has been indexed i.e. added to their giant database (which it uses to search and return the results) your website will not “exist” for Google. Unfortunately, there is no set time for Google to initially index your website. It can take even a few weeks for that to occur. But there are a few things you can do that can help with that.
Have actual content
Sounds obvious, but sometimes people forget that. In order to index your website, Google needs to find content -- words, sentences, text! Make sure your pages have relevant copy, especially your Home page. Describe what you do and what you offer, and name your pages properly. That makes sense not only for Google of course. For instance, having a Home page with just a giant image and no text will not help you, because Google will not know what it’s about. And since we’re talking about images, add a descriptive text (also known as the “Alt” attribute) to them.
Submit your website
If your website is completely new, you can manually submit it to Google. It will eventually be reviewed by a human (or an alien, who knows) and may be added to their index before Googlebots crawls it.
Site verification is a process that enables you to use certain site management tools provided by the search engine. This will enable you to use other tools such as Google Analytics, and will also serve as one more reminder for Google that your website exists. A website management system like Your Web Department makes it very easy to verify your website with Google, Yahoo, Bing and even Pinterest.
Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.
Whether you just got a website for your business or you’re converting an existing one, it’s highly recommended that you set up Google Analytics so it can start tracking its traffic for you. But in addition, it certainly may give Google a heads up that a new website is now live.
If you can, get other websites to link to yours. These links should come from real websites, not phony ones (in which case Google would actually penalize you). Clients, suppliers, partners and others may be interested in exchanging links with you.
Use social media
If you have profiles on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. add a link to your website from them. After all, Google gets to your website by crawling other websites, and social media websites count too. And make sure you share your website on social media as well.
Have other suggestions? Please let us know. And good luck with the new website!
Flavio Mester is a graphic designer as well as a systems analyst (in a distant life he was an architect). A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for the design and development of all the YWD website management platform interfaces. Flavio Mester on Google+ | Twitter | LinkedIn
This past week: The cell phone turned 40 and Facebook introduced Facebook Home for Android powered phones. It is quite fitting that Facebook announced their newest mobile foray on the anniversary of that first call by Marty Cooper, senior engineer for Motorola. I'm sure Marty Cooper had no idea how their invention was going to change our lives on that historic day in 1973. Cell phones, or the current smartphones are part of our everyday lives from the moment we wakeup until we go to sleep. Facebook is quite aware of this and has converted the Android phone into a Facebook first phone (by the way, only the latest hardware powered by Android would be able to run Facebook Home effectively). This is how important the mobile market is for Facebook, this is a great way to capture more eyes on the small screen. Yes there will be advertising; that's their revenue model. In fact it is the revenue model of all major FREE social networks and expect something similar from Google, Twitter and even Apple in the future. Continuing with our mobile push here is my tweet collection for this week.
The State of Mobile Content Marketing - infographic
This a great infographic, shows statistics for how effective different mobile targeted marketing campaigns can be. This could of good use when planing your next online campaign.
Don't forget to test!-> Avoid Sidewalk Catastrophes: Optimize Your Mobile Website
This is something most business websites owners forget to do, they see mobile as an after thought or they are in denial and think nobody is using their phone to reach their website. Well, they are doing just that. You only need to check the website traffic statistics and you will see some visitors did access your website using a smartphone. The number might be fraction of the overall traffic, but I can assure you this will increase.
Too many competing technologies-> Who Will Win As Mobile Payments Go Mainstream? [Slide Deck]
We were promised beginning of last year that 2012 would see major mobile payment adoption. It never materialized, there have been some successful attempts (like the case for Starbucks) but nothing that you might call major. The technology is here, but there are to many options to go about it and most businesses are confused as to which way to go forward with mobile payments.
In short depend on mobile-> 4 Ways to Maximize the Social Media Presence at Your Next Event
This is a good case when you can depend on your audience phone accessibility. Getting everyone to check the same hashtag on Twitter is a great way to distribute information and also to create a virtual forum to share ideas.
Cool productivity apps-> Mobile apps to smarten up your smartphone
We all know that the best part of a smartphone are the apps. Here is a list of very good apps to help your business and daily life.
Hey! Twitter just got better-> Mobile App Deep Linking
Now links you share on Twitter can open other apps on your phone, not just web pages. Another example of improving the mobile experience.
Learn to adapt-> RT @gwenm4: Small Business Is Missing The Digital/Mobile Revolution
How fast things change nowadays has caught many businesses by surprise; understandably big businesses take a while to change to the new way of doing things. Small business on the other hand have an advantage on adapting to the new trends, smaller operation are easier to steer to the new direction.
So true, on mobile get to the point-> 3 Essential Elements of a Mobile Website
When visitors come to your website they want to find the information they want quickly. When they are using a phone, their patience is even more limited.
Next Friday I'll have another round up, in the meantime you can follow me and YWD on the networks below:
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Responsive Design is becoming synonymous with mobile friendly websites. With the rapid growth of mobile devices and more so with tablets, there is a need for websites to fit the different screen sizes and screen orientation. Some people claim that responsive design is the solution to create one design that work in all mediums. I am in the other group that believes that the best user experience is achieved when sites are design for web and another version for mobile. But with all the buzz around responsive design, I think it is worth discussing it further.
What is responsive design
From Wkipedia:
"Responsive web design (RWD) is a web design approach aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).[1][2][3]
Mashable called 2013 the Year of Responsive Web Design.[4]"
Full article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsive_web_design. It is important to keep in mind that many supporters of responsive design advocate for designing for mobile first. This is done because content heavy and image heavy sites don't create great user experiences on mobile devises.
To see responsive design in action, look at this site http://www.acescholarships.org/Home?Lang=en-US on your desk top and then using your mouse minimize the size of your screen, you will see how the design adapts to the size of the screen.
Advantage of responsive design
The advantage of responsive design is that your entire website is mobile ready, it will conform to the visitors screen size and you only need to update content once (which with the right backend can be done without responsive design). Although the appearance of your site changes based on the screen you are viewing it on, because elements stack or spread out accordingly, the content, images and illustrations are all the same from one medium to the other.
Disadvantages of responsive design
The resizing and reorganizing of the different elements on a web page is achieved by using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and JavaScript, these are scripts that check the type of the device and size of screen the visitor is using. The more devices you want to accommodate there more code those scripts needs, increasing the weight of the page to be downloaded to the visitor's phone. You add this to the content of the page in question and it could be a painful experience for the mobile user, not to mention the data that will be used in their cellular plan.
As mentioned above good responsive design often leads with mobile first. This often means smaller images, less graphics and less content - even on your desktop site. When desktop leads responsive design, content heavy, image rich sites create a further drag on data and a less than ideal situation on a mobile device.
What you really need You need a website that delivers the best user experience for the medium. I have learned that on mobile you need to get to the point. This mean that you need to think what your website needs to do for you or your business. Does your website need to collect registrations, sell products or get people to call you? Whatever it is, make sure the visitor gets to do that right on the home page or let them know they are one tap away to get there.
With content, on mobile devises users are not likely to read as much, you may want to create custom content that is shorter or give users a synopsis with the option to link to more.
As far as navigation, just concentrate on the pages your visitor want to look at when using their phones. This might change with time or what you thought would be useful for the visitor experience could get proven wrong. Check your website stats and see what gets viewed or not viewed on mobile, this will give you a good indication on what to add or remove from the navigation.
This doesn't mean that the rest of the website doesn't need to be mobile ready. We are in the era of sharing social media and email marketing campaigns (newsletters) are a major source of traffic for most business websites.
Both social media and checking emails are activities that people prefer doing on their mobile device, you can't predict which page of your website is your mobile visitor going to land.
In my experience sites designed for each medium often create the most successful user experience. At the end of the day, responsive design is just one of the latest design fads looking for ways to create better mobile experiences, I am sure we will see many more mobile focused design fads as mobile use continues to grow.
At Your Web Department you can manage the content of both Mobile and Desktop websites on a single interface, and kept different content for both. Check the link below to find out more.
Gustavo Jabbaz started his digital career as a designer and then became a developer and these days spends most of his time as a digital marketer. A founding partner of Your Web Department, he's responsible for day-to-day operations, marketing and development strategy. He is who you talk to when you need support with SEO and/or Social Media. Gustavo Jabbaz on Google+ | Twitter
Advantage of responsive design
You need a website that delivers the best user experience for the medium. I have learned that on mobile you need to get to the point. This mean that you need to think what your website needs to do for you or your business. Does your website need to collect registrations, sell products or get people to call you? Whatever it is, make sure the visitor gets to do that right on the home page or let them know they are one tap away to get there.
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