Best Tips for Creating a Mobile-Friendly Website

Google reports presently attribute over 60% of online data to mobile devices. Now, that’s a clear indication that many more around the world people are accessing the internet from mobile devices. Digital marketers have quickly latched in on that vital reality to market online. Designing websites/blogs to be mobile-friendly is now smart marketing. What it simply means to have a mobile-friendly website design is that it prioritizes the design and development of a website suitable for mobile devices. The key elements in mobile-friendly website design involve optimizing the user experience on mobile devices. Thus, such websites must work optimally on smaller screens, at slower internet speeds and touch inputs which are peculiar to mobile devices. When websites/blogs are designed with the smallest screen in mind, it enables the website/blog to perform better on all devices, mobile devices inclusive. Here are some of the best tips that can help you to design a mobile-friendly website/blog.

 

Always Keep the User in Mind: You want your website to load fast and well on mobile devices, isn’t it? So, you must keep the users of mobile devices in mind when designing such websites. For a person holding a smartphone for instance, you’ll take into account at design stage what can help enhance the user experience of such a person. You must therefore focus on the user needs and wants from your website. You can then take deliberate steps to ensure that the website is designed to meet these needs.

Simplify Navigation: Mobile devices are small to handle and their maneuverability is rapid. This together with their small screens usually poses unique challenges for navigation on websites. So, if you want to improve their user experience, just simplify the navigation. This you can do by minimizing the number of navigation items and using a simple menu icon. This directly helps smartphone users to navigate the website more easily.

Design for the Smallest Screen First: If you design for the smallest screen first, it ensures that the website performs well on all devices. Pay special attention to designing for the smallest screen size. That’s about the only way to ensure that the website is optimized for mobile devices. Such designs can also perform well on larger screens too.

Prioritize Content: Content prioritization is essential if you are designing a mobile-friendly website. Since smartphones screens are really small, you must make sure that your website design prioritizes the most essential content that users are most likely to view on their mobile devices. You can simplify the content to ensure that it displays only the most important information that loads faster on mobile devices.

Use Responsive Design: A responsive design ensures that the website looks good on all devices particularly mobile devices. You can do this by using a flexible layout. This helps images to adjust to the screen size as they load.

Use Fast-Loading Images: When Images are too large and not optimized; they tend to slow down a website’s load time. This is more so on mobile devices. You can thus use optimized fast-loading images to ensure that the website loads quickly thus enhancing user experience.

Use White Space: White space is very essential for a mobile-friendly website design as it makes the content easier to read and navigate. If you use white space effectively, you can make the website more visually appealing. That directly helps to improve the user experience.

Optimize for Touch Input: Most mobile devices are operated essentially by touch inputs. This makes it imperative to optimize your website for touch inputs. You can therefore design buttons and other interactive elements that are large enough to click with a finger, but still have enough space between them to prevent accidental clicks.

Optimize Typography: You can optimize the topography of your website by designing it with the right font size and style suitable for mobile devices. You must therefore ensure that the fonts you use are not too large or too small. If for instance you use a font size that is too small, it becomes difficult if not impossible to read on small screens. Such scenario is not helpful for user experience. So, when a font is too small or difficult to read, it can make your website unusable on mobile devices.

Wrapping Up

Presently, nearly everyone around the world is clutching a smartphone and majority use these devices to do business on the internet. As a digital marketer, you’ll be losing out on this huge data if your website is not mobile-friendly. The foregoing tips can help to make your website more user-friendly and to greatly enhance the user experience of millions of mobile devices users.

How to Use Social Media for Website Marketing Strategies

As many digital marketers have since discovered, social media is one great resource for their marketing activities. It comes in very handy to use in nearly all website marketing strategies. Social media is not only hugely popular, with over 4.65 billion users worldwide, it is easy and cheap to use. It is in addition a great fun and very exciting way for marketers to reach their audience. There are so many benefits marketers derive from website marketing strategies. If they explore ways to use social media for these strategies, they have additional advantage of not having to bother so much about making search engine rankings. Following are strategies that help out this process.

Cyber Marketing Strategies

Marketers derive two major benefits when using social media in cyber marketing strategies. These strategies help build relationships with customers and potential customers by directing them to your website. Secondly, if you use the right social communities, you can easily build backlinks to your website through social media. Because some of the major social community websites on Facebook and Twitter in particular use a “no-follow” tag with the hyperlinks on their sites, they disable the ability for websites to increase their search engine rankings by linking to them from the social sites. By this action, these popular social media sites become especially useful for directing tons of traffic to the marketer’s website. However, there are other social websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, that don’t use “no-follow” tags. Marketers can effectively use these sites to get backlinks and to direct traffic to their websites. These benefits do not however compare to the benefits derivable from more popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Using social media for internet marketing strategies is a bit complicated. Marketers really need extra care when using these strategies on social media to avoid spamming label. Yeah, you can promote your business on social media but when updating your status, you must take extra care to avoid making your products promotion too obvious. If you do, you risk getting your audience bored and losing interest in your content updates. Once you recognize that there is a fine line between spamming and regular advertising, it is left to you to strictly observe some updating strategies in your social media posts that will respect this distinction. One of such observances is that you should never make every status update you make to link back to your website. If you do, you are clearly spamming. What is advisable is to make your updates as if you are serving valuable content then occasionally throw in a link back to your website. If you blog on your website, so much the better. You can make a blog post and share on social media. That automatically links back to your website without a semblance of spam.

Social Media Interactions

Ease of interaction and sharing of information are some of the biggest advantages of social media to website marketing. On social media, people know who they are dealing with as human. They are thus very free to ask questions, give answers, make comments, offer solutions and give feedback with ease. Social media puts a personal face on you the business person and that helps to put your audience at ease. Building a reputation for you and your business becomes much easier that way. You can maintain that reputation through every single update you make on social media. You should keep your content mostly focused on your niche and how the info you give can be helpful to your audience. On social media, if you want to maintain your reputation with your audience, avoid any content about race, religion and politics. Making social media updates about these subjects no matter how subtle can hurt your reputation and even your business. It is best to avoid them all together.