Tips to Create an Effective Mobile Website

We live in a BYOD world. It’s just a fact that mobile devices are now part of our everyday lives. We use them to stay in touch, to entertain us, and increasingly, to find information we need quickly. While mobile presents organizations with a significant opportunity to engage people wherever they are, many organizations have not yet found the right formula to create and deliver a quality mobile experience. Here are five tips, identified by Jess Iandiorio, vice president of product marketing at Acquia, to help organizations get started in creating great mobile digital experiences.

Click through for tips to help organizations get started in creating a great mobile digital experience, as identified by Jess Iandiorio, vice president of product marketing at Acquia.

Get in the mobile mindset

In our digital age, organizations need to reset their traditional IT thinking from “let’s create a website” to “let’s create a mobile-first design.” And part of that is remembering the app approach is outdated; it’s really all about the mobile website. Instead of creating a desktop experience, then trying to squeeze it onto a mobile device, mobile-first design encourages organizations to design an optimal mobile experience before they consider the desktop. This approach ensures organizations can extend their mobile presence without diluting the desktop experience.

Remember the end user

Before beginning any project, it’s critical for the IT team to clearly define the end user and understand why users are accessing your mobile site in the first place. Whether the mobile site is designed for commerce, for sharing content, or to connect people through communities, the end-user experience must be top of mind. At the end of the day, it’s really about making their experience as seamless and enjoyable as possible.

Don’t force it

Similar to any other IT project, it’s okay to start small and build over time as you get a better sense of behaviors and usage. This will allow you to customize the site appropriately, ensuring it performs the way you need it to. Another benefit to the start-small approach is that you limit risks as you learn along the way, enabling agility and flexibility within your development process.

Consider responsive design

Not every device has the same screen size and resolution. Responsive design advocates maintaining a single website for all devices and device resolutions. It allows a site to adjust its layout depending on the size of the screen; basically, instead of shrinking the entire site to fit the screen, items on the page can stack and flow differently, creating a longer page where text, images and buttons stay at a size that is still easily viewable on a smaller screen. The goal is a seamless viewing experience that looks and feels consistent when viewed on any device.

Personalize it!

Regardless of the approach you take for mobile site design (whether employing a responsive design or delivering a dedicated mobile site), personalized experiences are still a must. Your core site experience needs to deliver the right content to the right user at the right time in the right format based on the device being used. Context is king, and your personalization solution needs to detect each individual device as a referring source, and hopefully geo-location as well. These two critical pieces of information about user context should give an organization all the information they need to provide what feels like a unique and individual experience across all digital touch-points.