If you own a website or blog, or you plan becoming a webmaster someday then this post is for you. Back in the days when we started blogging and especially when I started using the internet (10 years ago), surfing the internet via cell phones and the available Smartphone’s then was not fun at all. GPRS was prevalent then and very weak when available in many parts of the world then. What was in our mind then was mainly how to learn new HTML codes, CSS and other stuffs like creating animated pictures and Macromedia (now Adobe) flash files for the beautification of our websites that was viewed primarily from the famous Internet Explorer and Safari browser.
But things have changed greatly right now. Internet users across the globe now seem to prefer browsing the net from their smart phones, Tablets and mobile portable devices. Unfortunately, very unfortunate indeed, many webmasters and blog owners totally ignore the fact that the world is going more mobile than ever. This is demonstrated by the fact that many websites and blog are yet to be mobile friendly. How do you feel when it takes you several minutes to load a single page of a site using your mobile browser and the site sends and downloads a great deal of data just to open a single page!? I personally feel bad because the site owners ought to have a Mobile site!
What is a mobile site?
A mobile site isn’t a completely different site from your desktop site, but when a webmaster configures his site to automatically detect whether the user is browsing from a mobile or desktop browser, the site’s plug-in a mobile friendly version of the site if the request is coming from a mobile browser. This mobile display varies from device to device. High-end phones like iPhone5 and Androids are sometimes set to load a richer content than budget phones like Nokia Java devices like the C3 and the rest of them. Generally, mobile sites are set to load less media by either compressing the available scripts and media on the desktop site or choose to ignore loading them completely.
Benefits of a mobile site
If your site is mobile friendly, your visitors will enjoy these benefits:
- Site or Blog loads faster on mobile browsers: This is the primary advantage of browsing a site from the mobile version. Mobile sites are generally configured to adapt perfectly to mobile browser requests making the sites load faster when on mobile.
- Saves data: Visitor downloads and saves fewer amounts of data (bytes) thereby saving not only time but money also. As I earlier highlighted, mobile sites resize site scripts and media sizes thereby reducing its download size. Many mobile internet surfers subscribe to normal internet plans that charge per kilobyte. So fewer amounts of packet data means more money saved!
- Site adjusts to mobile screen size: The screen display size of many devices vary from phone to phone. Mobile sites make a maximum use of every available screen size. Unlike a desktop site, mobile site can shred off extra widths or sidebars of a main site and either make the text to flow or convert both the side bars and the main body into a single column display. This is true of Mymobnet!’S mobile site. With this feature, users browsing from a small sized screen will not regret so much why they didn’t acquire a 5 inch device 😉
- Compatible adverts like mobile adsense easily show up: Many mobile browsers will not load the large or rich media advert scripts. Example is Google adsense scripts. So any site that isn’t mobile friendly will not display such ads properly and ironically will not display mobile adsense.
- Scripts work properly: Many scripts like JavaScript’s and CSS are function well only in desktop browsers. This is why many users find it uneasy or even impossible to get a nice desktop view of a site in their phone. This also explains why it isn’t easy to fill in info on forms in a site that isn’t mobile friendly. Infact poor functioning of scripts on mobile browsers can make the site look disfigured from your mobile browser!
Many other benefits of a mobile site abounds which can’t be enumerated here. Why not Google on how to install a suitable mobile site for your website platform?