My partner and I spent a day in London at Tate Modern the other week, trying to work out what the heck the Damian Hirst exhibition was all about. While we were in the capital we decided to go out for a meal, and I used my iPhone to find a restaurant. Eventually we spotted a Turkish place that sounded great. The only problem was their website wasn’t formatted for mobile phones and it was impossible to see the menu.
Fortunately for them we decided to go ahead and give them a try anyway, and the meal we had was delicious (Antalya Restaurant, just off Russell Square, if you’re ever in the area!) But actually if we’d been fussy eaters who wanted to see the menu before we booked a table they might have missed out on our custom.
More and more of us are using our phones to get local information and if your site isn’t mobile-friendly you could be missing out on sales. Often well constructed sites that look stunning on monitors are difficult to read and even more challenging to navigate on a phone – and if your site uses Flash your mobile visitors could just see a black screen! Google says that two in every five searches are now done on mobile phones – and by this time next year we’ll be doing more web browsing on our phones than our computers – so it’s really important that your website is easy to use on a phone.
You can assess how mobile-friendly your website is at the WC3 website validator. Ideally it should score above 90% – my own site scored 0% though! I now have a mobile version of this site which is automatically displayed if anyone visits on a mobile phone (and it’s clever enough to distinguish between phones and tablets!) Although it’s a cut-down version of this site, it has my latest blog posts as well as key information about my services and prices – and, most importantly, a great big button inviting you to call me!
If your website scores low on mobile friendliness then there are solutions. Drop me a line and I’ll build you a free, no-obligation mobile-friendly template to show you how good your site could look on a phone.
