Offering mobile web services. What hosting companies need to do to get it right?

Bylawmacs

October 12, 2012 ,

There is an increasing amount of web traffic coming from mobile phones today. According to the recent mobile marketing stats, there is a nearly 200% increase I web traffic globally since 2010, ensuring that this is a really booming business. This is not just a trend. So what do you need to do to make sure that you are competitive in the mobile web services arena? We have some tips for you below.

Back to basics – provide what is essential

When you visit a site on your desktop – what is your main goal? It is to seek the answers to your questions or in other words, to gather information. Guess what? If you are using your mobile phone’s Internet, you are also after the exact same thing! Being on mobile accentuates the need to know information – FAST! This is why you cannot or will not wait until you get to your desktop, for the information that you need. Regardless of what this information is, the mobile site must be able to deliver it to you with minimal disturbances.

This gives us a few basic and yet often ignored aspects of mobile web hosting. The site must be:

  • Easy to load so that even the less powerful mobile browsers can view them almost instantly
  • Laid out in a way that the most important information is on the upper quarter of the page, making it easy to read and view
  • Compatible enough to be displayed on a wide variety of devices

Mobile widgets and plugins are a must

Using pre-made widgets and plugins are essential not only in cutting your development time into half but also in making sure that the user experience is really helpful, intuitive and easy to understand. Widgets such as links to Facebook and Twitter allow your products to be easily shared to a person’s circle of friends. Plugins that convert a desktop site into a mobile site, especially those with specific looks per platform, is very helpful to have.

The mobile scene is very fragmented but at the same time, they have a lot of common aspects. This is not just a shrunken desktop – you have touch screen interfaces, the need to lessen keypad input (more on that in the section below) and the need to make the images and other page parts easy to load.

Making selection easy

Selecting items using your mobile phone is not the easiest thing. Remember the limitations of the mobile platform especially in terms of:

Text entry.  A keypad may not always be present and it is much more difficult to enter text into tiny text fields.

  • Make buttons and select-able items easy to touch with your fingertips since touch screen interfaces are so common.
  • ·       Do not employ horizontal scrolling, as much as possible.

Addressing the fragmented platforms

There are several mobile platforms that you need to think about – Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, Linux Mobile and even the older ones like Symbian. There are so many operating systems that you need to think about and even a larger amount of screen sizes to address. Think about your target market first, what type of phone they most likely have and then tailor your site for them.

Francis is a free lancer writer and he is expert in providing training for iPage

0 thoughts on “Offering mobile web services. What hosting companies need to do to get it right?”
  1. I think The best topic which attract me so much here is Plugins.There is something which can make our post good and get a fact by attracting many and many targeted audience.

  2. Mobile web is moving fast, with mobile internet access set to overtake PC access within the next 5 years. It also opens up a whole new field of opportunity for businesses willing to take on and embrace the mobile world.

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