Xpose yourself on the move, with a mobile friendly website!

Is your website iPhone-friendly? New figures show that over 70% of business websites are not optimised for mobile use. Here are five simple things to think about when Xposing your site to mobile users!

Without getting into the XHTML, CS3 and coding of it all, I’ve got a few questions for you to think about so that you can see how mobile-friendly your site is.

1. Does your site contain any Flash animation or complex Javascript?
 Currently, all mobile Apple devices including the iPhone and the new iPad do not run Flash. Therefore if your site uses Flash for navigation or to run the whole site, it won’t work on these devices.
2. Does your site contain lots of large images?
 Whilst browsing on a 3G network on a Blackberry, android or iPhone, these images can take a long time to download and can disengage a user before they find what they are searching for.
3. Do you use forms on your site?
 If so, make sure they are in a straightforward column, not two. On a small mobile device, a two-column form can be difficult to use and deter users from entering their details.
4. Does your site contain video?
 If so, check that it is not flash-based. Many of the free video hosting sites convert your video into a flash video. Flash-based videos again do not currently work on the iPhone or iPad.
5. Does your site take more than 30 seconds to load?
 Again, if it takes a while on a broadband connection, then it will take even longer on a mobile 3G network.

If you have any of these aspects on your website then I’m willing to bet your site isn’t very mobile friendly.

Solutions to these problems are to remove the offending piece of code, such as the large images, two-column forms etc. or, build a simpler, mobile-friendly site. So when a user arrives at your site on a mobile device, the site recognises they are using an iPhone, iPad, Android, or Blackberry, and loads a specially designed, quick-loading, easy-to-use mobile version of your site.