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Key Points to Making Mobile Websites Effective

• Remember, mobile interfaces are tiny compared to regular websites. So to create a clean, functional & professional looking mobile website, designers have to work with pre-defined spacial capacity.
• Your company logo should be at the top, and be attractive and eye-catching, but not too big (in either font or in file size) Keep it to 2 KBs or less for maximum user access
• Just below your logo, include some easy Navigation links to your regular website – first and foremost, a link to your Home Page is crucial, then other pages, such as landing pages with special enticing offers are always good to incorporate
• Content – If you can avoid changing the content from what your regular website displays, so much the better. Customers can become confused if you aren’t consistent with what your promoting. It’s fine to reduce your content on your mobile site to major value points, but be sure to provide links to the main article for those who are seeking that.
• Images – Be sure you cut down the size of any images you use – making mobile websites productive means using the proper sizing for attractiveness’ sake as well as not overloading the smart phone with slow-loading imagery. Only use small images and graphics where they’re relevant contextually. As for format for making mobile websites images most user friendly, stick with JPEG, .GIF or .PNG as they’re considered lightweight compared to other formats. Be sure to compress your pictures to avoid zooming, and always use the ALT text property for image.
• Footer/Copyright at the Bottom – Keep it simple and clean; don’t overload it with lots of links

All right, so those are all things to be sure to include. What should you avoid when making mobile websites?

STAY AWAY FROM….

• Javascript, Flash or any other “fancy” scripts – these simply take way too long to load, and you’ll get frustrated mobile customers who probably won’t check out your site again
• Ads – Stay away from using very many ads even though It’s tempting, because CPM (Cost for 1,000 impressions) is high on mobile devices – but don’t go there! It makes you look greedy & customers will feel you don’t care about their experience using your website, just the dollars it generates. This goes not only for making mobile websites successful, but for regular websites as well.

The Ultimate Cheater’s Way of Making Mobile Websites.
Just as there are templates and website builders for regular websites, there are also several mobile website builders you may wish to investigate. Here are a few:

• Mobify
• Wirenode
• Mofuse
• WP-touch Pro

Please consider these a starting point – there are other mobile website builders available, and undoubtedly more will continue popping up, just as there seems to be a new social networking website every few days.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” via making mobile websites that generate revenue and drive more traffic your way is easier than you may have ever dreamed. Here’s wishing you the best with your mobile website launch!

All right, so you’ve got your website running, all your social media connecting perking along, and your blog cranking away on a regular basis. What’s missing…..? Well, if you’re not on the SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing bandwagon yet, it’s your next logical move. In the technological climate of smart phone usage being incredibly high, you can’t afford not to jump into the mobile mix of SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing. (Just one rapidly growing statistic which might convince you - Mobi Thinking’s Strategy

Why You Should Start SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing
Basically, using SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing has become a necessity in order to be a viable competitor in today’s marketplace, particularly on the local level. With so many consumers shopping via smart phone, it doesn’t make sense NOT to add an SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing app to your already existent online promotions and activities.Cross promoting your blog, social media posts and SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing are plain and simply, where it’s at today. If someone else who provides similar goods and services to you has their SMS platform in place and you don’t, you’re automatically missing out on that high demographic of consumers who prefer to surf, shop and buy online while they’re on the go.

Make sure you have a quick & easy sign-up process for your SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing campaign in place – on your website, your blog, and via your social media presence. It’s also important to have an equally easy opt out process.Stay to the Point – Short & Sweet With SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing, always remember that your importance to your customers is in direct correlation with the value they perceive your service/product brings to their incredibly busy life. So keep your text messages brief, to the point, and geared toward what matters to them. Topical reminders of sales or events are one great way to make good usage of
your SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing, but don’t overdo and under no circumstances, NEVER ever spam. Quality over quantity is the name of the game.If you send out too many messages you’ll come across as desperate and will definitely offend some people in the process. Although consumers are getting more savvy
to SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing interaction every day, many still reserve the majority of their texting activity to personal use. If you over-text, not only will you lose a handful of customers that will resent the overkill, but you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll also post about it on their social media network,
and before you know it, your name might just be poison. Definitely not worth the risk.

While your website and SMS Marketing, Text Message Marketing can piggyback off of one another to a degree, make sure you’re not duplicating your email offers to your SMS customers. That’s just another version of spamming. Keep your text offers brief, in the moment, and always incorporate value for your customers. Using coupons, contests and games keeps your SMS users involved and wondering what great idea (translation: “offer”) you’re going to put out there next. Polls, Text2Win contests and trivia contests are all great interactive usage of SMS Marketing. The more creative & fun you make these tools, the more buzz it will create via the social media pipeline, and the more SMS subscribers you’ll gain.Text Message Marketing is a very affordable way to keep yourself in the running with your competition. It also builds customer loyalty and keeps their interest in your business piqued. R U ready 2 rumble? (In a good way, as in wrestling with the texting competition) Go 4 it! 

Key Points For Determining Your Mobile Website Strategy

• First, key in on your mobile website strategy’s purpose. Mobile websites typically have a starting point of a) being a brand new website & thus requiring both mobile and desktop strategy; b) being an addition to an existent desktop site, which will remain the same, or c) being a revamp/redesign of an existent desktop website, which will now have a new mobile site added into the mix.
• If your project happens to be a redesign (the most typical scenario nowadays), or your mobile site will be an addition to your existing desktop site, do a bit of data study before you jump right into development and design. In other words, the desktop site has hopefully been using metrics tracking software such as Google Analytics to track traffic. This can help you determine what browsers & devices your users access the site from. So although you want your mobile website strategy to include built-in device support, you may want to hone into those most-used browsers and target them as high priorities from concept all the way through to testing and eventually launching your mobile site.
  
• Don’t merely copy your desktop website. Rather, your mobile website strategy should be one that complements your existing desktop version.Mobile users are on the go, remember – so deliver the most important info easily, speedily and intuitively.
• No matter which scenario describes your point of entry with your mobile site’s creation, you need to bear in mind first and foremost the user’s experience – don’t load up your mobile website with too many images (slow-loading on smart phones, which will lose a mobile web surfer in a heartbeat). And be sure you’ve created ease of ordering off the site. The majority of smart phone consumers tend to make pretty immediate point of purchase decisions when they’ve stopped their “on the go” activities long enough to peruse a mobile website or two. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not having simple “Pay Now” buttons that parallel your desktop site’s payment methods.
• Consider being platform independent in order to reach the widest audience. For instance, if you only gear your mobile apps toward iPhone users, you’re cutting out a large group of other smart phone users.
• Simplicity is a Thing of Beauty – Again, keeping file size small and load times short are a good rule of thumb with mobile site design. For user ease, the old paradigm of “less is more” holds extremely true for mobile sites. You have a much smaller viewing field, so you must select your elements of layout and navigation wisely. This is not to say you can’t have ANY imagery – CSS3 provides a great toolkit for mobile design, including drop-shadows, gradients, and rounded corners, to name a few. Make your site as attractive as possible, but bear in mind that navigability is king.

Layout & Design Features to Include in Your Mobile Website Strategy

• A Single-Column Layout design is usually best for the small screen. It’s conducive to easily flip from portrait to landscape mode, and scaling between different device resolutions.
• Optimizing the single column even further, you can build in collapsible navigation which allows you to stack large bytes of content in folding modules. That way, the majority of the text is hidden unless the user’s interest is piqued and he wants to tap open that chunk of content.
• Take your desktop website’s “clickable” components and make them “tappable” since smart phone interaction is done via finger taps. So making your buttons larger is important. Also, bear in mind there’s not a “hover” state for mobile websites – so for instance, a drop-down menu will appear on the first tap. So hovering is an element that you’ll have to rework for your mobile site.
• Provide Feedback to Users – One way to do this is whenever a user taps a button or link, that button or link should change in appearance to allow the user to know the action requested is in process. You may also want to make the waiting game a bit more entertaining for your users by incorporating an animated loading image to convey to them that their request has been initiated.
• Run tests of your new mobile website on as many different devices as possible. You can do this via web-based emulators or installing the developer SDK for specific platforms.

Ready – Set –  Get going with your mobile site & Good Luck!

When you’re getting ready to launch your mobile website, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. For instance, there is a different standard for advertisements and graphics when it comes to mobile content. Here are a few of the top considerations that you should make before hitting the publish button.

• Keep it simple. When visitors browse your site on their mobile device, they don’t want to be bombarded with graphics and fancy texts that don’t convert well. Instead, the best mobile website themes are very simple – they’re typically a white background with very few graphics and readable fonts. When in doubt, stick with the classics, like Arial and Verdana – and don’t go overboard on the italic, bold and underlined text. In addition to keeping the background a simple color, make sure that you pick a font color that’s easy on the eyes – black and dark blue typically work well.
• Ditch the flashy banners. You should always make sure that your banners and other advertisements are mobile ready – if they aren’t, they won’t appear like you want them, which ultimately means less revenue. You can definitely use most of the popular advertisers on your site, including Google Adsense; however, you will need to make sure that you are creating ad blacks specifically for a mobile site. If you don’t, they won’t appear correctly when the page loads.
• Break up your text. Ensuring that the text blocks on your mobile website are readable is one of the most important things that you can do when you are creating a site for mobile users. If you don’t take the time to break up the text into small paragraphs no more than 3-5 sentences, then your readers won’t stick around long enough to see what you have to say.

Mobile marketing is becoming a very popular method for getting the word out about your brand – this includes creating a well optimized and easy to read mobile website.