Is Your Web Site Mobile Phone-Friendly?
With the advent of the iPhone and now the G-1 Google Android, more people are shopping online via their cell phones.
Don’t think you ever will buy something with your phone? I thought that too until a few days ago. My new G-1 scans barcodes, finds better deals online, and sends me to the site to make a purchase. Couldn’t be easier, and I love the convenience!
Using Andy Moore’s WordPress Mobile Plugin or a php file to detect mobile devices in your blog will make it come up beautifully on phones – try SEO Diva if you have Internet access with your phone and you’ll see what I mean.
Regular web sites won’t usually work well on on a mobile phone. Fortunately, it’s not that hard to make them phone-friendly. You need to add a cascading style sheet (CSS) to your web site that feeds specific instructions to a mobile browser.
TopRank Blog makes these suggestions:
When designing your CSS for handheld web browsers, here are a few things to consider:
- You have very limited screen real estate. About 2×3 inches or so.
- All fonts should be in their most basic format. Forget about color and typography.
- All images should be stripped out, unless they are absolutely necessary.
- Remove all advertising as you already have limited screen space.
- If you don’t need it, hide it. Remove any MyBlogLog, Twitter or other second hand services. Focus on your content.
- Remove all background colors. Basic black text on a white background is good.
- Create basic forms, if you choose to keep them. My advice would be to remove them and just showcase the phone number. They are on their cell phone after all.
- Remove Flash, Java and any plug-in content unless absolutely necessary.
- All in all, simplify.
You don’t have to be a CSS expert to do this. Head over to Elance or Odesk and hire someone to make one for you. It won’t be expensive, and if you sell any product or service it will certainly be worthwhile to make your site phone-friendly.
If you want to test your blog or site, you can do so on the live demo of Opera Mini…just type the URL in the demo handset.
