Many know the impact of a website: far reaching and almost free advertisement. However, mobile interfaces are usually small and so a developer has to re-create in a flexible layout, resize all image contents etc.
Hunor Networking provides a low cost presence on the rapidly growing mobile Web. With an easy to use control panel, you can edit / maintain your mobile website, saving you some in maintenance.
Therefore, your mobile website has the potential to provide you with the capability to:
- Maintain your website, which Hunor Networking specially design for mobile devices of all kinds.
- Add maps, one touch dialing, and special promotions for visitors.
- Automatically detect whether to display the full site or mobile site to visitors.
With mobile Web users increasing by 148% in 2009 alone, having an easy to reach mobile presence is key to increasing your online exposure.
The number of people who browse the Internet on their cell phones is on the rise and if your website is not accessible via mobile phones or is not mobile friendly, you are losing a large portion of potential traffic.
CODING
This is one thing where many new mobile-interface developers hesitate. Below are some tips that can help remove that hesitation:
- VALID CODE:
Use proper code and make sure that its 100% valid because most mobile browsers aren’t as good as their PC (Personal-Computer) counterparts so you should make sure that it’s valid.
- FLUID LAYOUTS:
It’s not always easy to discover how your layout will look on all mobile browsers as there are far too many mobile devices used for web browsing and to track them all can be a big pain. One way to address/bypass this problem is the use fluid layouts that will automatically adjust to the screen size.
To accomplish this avoid setting widths in pixels and use percentages or ems instead. For instance, instead of:
width: 400px;
use
width: 100%
or
width: 1.0ems
- SPECIFIC STYLESHEETS
You can always target various mobile devices for better user-experience. For example, for targeting users browsing your site using Handheld devices you can use this in your website’s <head>:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”handheld.css” type=”text/css” media=”handheld”/>
You can find more about these media types at this link: W3.org – Media Types.
- SAY “NO” TO FANCY SCRIPTS
For your mobile website to go successful, don’t use Javascript or Flash or any other of those fancy scripts available out there. Because majority of mobile devices fail to interpret these and end up either freezing the device or just doing something stupid!
If you really want to use these then should give your user a Polite Option so that your user knows what his/her mobile handset is loading and opening up (and if anything goes wrong, it’s their fault and not yours because you already warned them).
- TAKE IT EASY WITH THE ADS
This is one thing that almost everyone should take care of! Don’t fill up your mobile page with ads. And this is not only for the mobile page but also for the original website.
It’s an old saying, “One rotten Apple in a basket makes all others dirty”. It goes true for these websites which are full of ads. These websites don’t care about User-Experience but only care about the money that comes into their pockets (because CPM is high on mobile devices).
So my suggestion, just don’t fill it up with ads! “Just don’t make your page with colourful ads.”
- MOBILE BROWSER DETECTION (AUTOMATIC)
For making your brand successfull you should also include an automatic “Mobile Browser Detection & Redirection” server-side script (eg. PHP). You might also use this as User Agent detection, where a server makes a decision on what to serve based on how an incoming browser describes its capabilities. You might also want to use this as an alternative or fallback method to the previous one Mobile Browser Detection in PHP. Other implementations feature real-time JavaScript requests to databases like DeviceAtlas or WURFL that also supply information on what a device can do. A mobile version is not complete until it’s automatically triggered for every mobile user!
- MAKE A DEDICATED APPLICATION CLIENT (if necessary)
Yes! You read it correctly. If you have a really high user-base, make a dedicated application targeting various mobile interfaces. Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Yahoo and many other big-companies have done this and this is why they have been so successful. If you make an application for specific handsets then you no longer have to care about all the Fancy scripts etc. because you can then enhance the application your own way (you can’t change the mobile browser but definitely your own application).