Update: Hurricane Irene changing how you do business
The recent hurricane brought to light a major miss step by many businesses. With so many people out of power this past week many of them ran their business using their smart phones. We noticed here at IWD that there are many websites that are not smart phone friendly. If you do not have a smart friendly website you may be losing business every day, especially this past week. Check your website and see what you come up with. If it doesn’t look the way you want, read our tips below to make your website more smart phone friendly.
Check out these examples of websites that may look good on your computer screen, but not on your phone.
As you probably can tell just by looking around the office, smart phones are growing at an enormous rate. In 2009, 175 million smart phones were sold, which increased to 298 million in 2010. Now, IMS Research is predicting that by the end of 2011, smart phones sales will reach 420 million.
These numbers demonstrate how important it is to have a smart phone friendly website. Here are our top 5 tips to help you have a smart phone friendly website.
1. No Flash!
Apple smart phones and iPads cannot read flash. This means an apple user who goes to your site will only see a blank screen. According to IMS Research, Apple controls almost 20% of the smart phone market, which is a lot of people seeing blank screens.
2. Design and Content Changes
The best way to see how your website looks on a smart phone is to go on a smart phone and look at it. The way a smart phone displays your information may convince you to change the design of your website or change the layout of your content. Different smart phones can read websites differently, so it is important to check different types of phones to get the whole picture.
3. Plug-ins
If you have a content management system site like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and others; you can download plug-ins to your website that will automatically re-size your website and make it more smart phone friendly.
4. Minimize Clicks
It is cumbersome for smart phone users to click through multiple pages on their phones to get to a page they want. When you are (re)designing your website, try and keep the navigation and internal links on your site as simple as possible.
5. Fast Load Times
Smart phones tend to take longer to load a website than a computer. If you have a site that takes several seconds to load on a computer, you better believe it will take a lot longer to load on a phone. People are very impatient these days, and you don’t want to lose a potential customer simply because your website didn’t load fast enough. If your site has long load times, work with a web development specialist to help your site load faster.
Infinite Web Designs is committed to designing websites that work for computers and smart phones alike. We know how important it is to stay ahead of your competition. Our experienced team has the industry knowledge to create a website that has the technology to help your business grow online. Please contact IWD today to get a free consultation.
Source: IMS Research
