Maryland Web Design Company Discusses Importance of a Mobile Website

When looking at the traffic patterns of our clients for the last few months, we see that around 2 to 8 percent of all visitors that access their sites have done so from a mobile device. Some sites are more likely to receive mobile traffic than others, for instance, retail sites and local service sites seem to receive higher amounts of mobile visitors than manufacturing and other services. We think that this trend will continue in the Maryland area, because smartphone users are now spending equal time talking on the phone as they do browsing the Internet. The latest predictions show that by 2012, half of all business travelers will leave laptops in the office and take just their mobile devices on trips

For this reason, it is becoming increasingly important to consider the experience a mobile user has when they visit your website. Sites will need to become user-friendly online surfing experiences for mobile devices. In looking again at our web analytics results from our customers, we see the following trends in the types of mobile devices that currently access websites. The Android, iPhone, iPad, and Blackberry are the four most popular devices according to our statistics. Therefore it is essential that businesses test their website experience on each of these devices to ensure that the links work, the site loads correctly, and the major content is visible quickly.

There are actually very few sites that have been coded with mobile search in mind. For this reason, the major mobile search engines like Google Mobile, AOL, Windows Live and others have transcoded websites to the layout and format best suited to their devices. In this way they have much more mobile content to present to their users. If your web pages have been transcoded, they are hosted temporarily on the search engine’s servers and domain, rather than your own, which means that visitors are not really even on your site. Usually these transcoded sites are poorly formatted with strange looking images or broken links, and most people click away from them quickly anyway.

For this reason it is important that you code a different version of your site for mobile visitors, and this way, you can deliver a standards compliant mobile site and avoid any transcoding. The next step is to submit your mobile sitemap to search engines and to DMOZ so that they use that version of the site. Most search engines have a robust help center to aid you in this process.

Remember that your mobile website will have different goals than your desktop website. For instance, most mobile users are not doing extensive research, so it is not necessary to have that type of information on the mobile version. Instead, create a simple site with straightforward navigation that takes users quickly and easily to the content they need. Make sure your programmers follow the W3C MobileOK (level 1.0) standards. These guidelines provide coding instructions to make your content mobile ready. Do not use any frames, Flash, or Ajax because they do not render correctly on mobile devices. Use short and concise page titles, headers, text and images to avoid the chance of transcoding. In addition you may want to purchase a dotMobi domain, which could help in mobile SEO efforts.

If your Maryland website doesn’t cut it in the mobile world, you may want to consider redesigning a new version of your company information specifically geared toward mobile users. This way you can avoid frustration by your mobile users.