Building a Mobile Site: Tools?

[jesse-landry]

I've been tasked with re-building our company's mobile site and honestly have zero experience doing so. I know my way around HTML pretty well and have built several websites but never for mobile.

Does anybody have any recommendations for me as far as tools to use to construct a proper mobile site? I basically want a simple page with four buttons on the front and a little drop down menu in the top corner. (not that this matters terribly but just saying, shouldn't need to be overly complicated.)

Thanks in advance!

[jesse-landry]

Kristina -

Thanks for reaffirming my notions! And that is a brilliant friggin' idea.. "mobile first!!" I LOVE IT!

Alrighty so I'll keep pluggin' away and I'm betting on the mobile site drawing in a surprising number of conversions as a result.. Time will tell! Thanks again

[jesse-landry]

Wow Kristina thank you so much for all of these helpful tips and resources. This is fantastic. You guys over at Distilled are doing impressive work and I'm jealous of all of you over there working for such a fabulous company who gets it.

Yes time is tight on this project.. money not so much. I actually have a pretty decent budget to play with. That said we recently underwent a site re-design and while I personally think we should sub it out and have a professional (with my guidance) re-design the site AGAIN with responsive design, I can not convince my bosses of this. And my main concern with responsive design is that it would take a massive overhaul of our current site and take much more time.

But I'm also concerned with the content. There is far too much content on our current desktop site which I don't think fits at all in mobile. So that was the main reason I wanted a separate mobile site.. the content was to be scaled back, simplified, and streamlined with a much smaller sitemap and much less "blah blah blah." (Of course I feel our main site should be this way too but I digress. I'm hoping that I can design the mobile site with this concept and show a higher conversion rate thus helping my case to re-thinking our desktop site.)

At MozCon Avinash told us all we sucked and showed us how we sucked. His favorite mobile site was motrin's (m.motrin.com) which is a separate site with scaled-back content. I have to agree with him that it's pretty sleek and does the job. Basically I am addressing this from the angle of "if a potential/current client lands on our page via mobile, what are they trying to see or do?" and the answer is most likely far less than the desktop site offers.

Does this make sense to you and seem like good reasoning to stick with the mobile design? I've been playing with the dudamobile builder and it is so incredibly easy that I may just end up doing that and paying them their $9/month to host it ad-free.

Anyway thanks again for the awesome response!

[KristinaKledzik]

Hey Jesse,

There's a lot of debate about the ideal way to build a mobile website, but your initial question made me think that you don't have a lot of time and/or money to spend on this. Is that correct?

If it isn't, I would spend some time researching the pros and cons of responsive vs. a separate mobile site (I won't go into it too much more than that - I'm obviously biased: http://moz.com/blog/seo-of-responsive-web-design). Setting your company up with the right sort of site the first time around is going to save you a lot of time, effort and money in the future. I really like Aleyda's mobile site audit to help guide you: http://www.stateofsearch.com/mobile-seo-audit/

But, if you don't have the time/money/support to knock it out of the park quite yet, building a decent separate mobile site is a good option. (You can't really half-ass responsive or else you'll mess up your desktop site too.)

You originally said you're good with HTML, so have you thought about just building the site yourself, with inspiration from CMS templates? Building mobile sites isn't that different from building desktop sites, although you want to stick to HTML and CSS as much as possible (no Flash)! The bigger issue is figuring out the design with such a drastically smaller screen size.

Like I said, you can probably look at a great CMS's design and mimic it somewhat with your own HTML. You can also read our guide to mobile best practices, http://www.distilled.net/training/mobile-seo-guide/ (ahem not to over promote ourselves or anything), which has a section on design. The key issues I'd keep in mind are:

• Use your web analytics to figure out the standard screen size for your mobile visitors. It's probably around 320px. Design your mobile site for that width, but make everything relative (i.e. 80% vs 80px) so that the display will change to fit the size of the mobile visitor's phone
• A button or link needs 28px x 28px around it to be easy to click. If it's inline links, there can be text around it, but no other links.
• Redesign for a single column layout. Get rid of ads or move them to the top or bottom of the body copy. Hide navigation behind a drop down. I really like how Bridgestone does that: http://m.bridgestonetire.com/
• Make your mobile site fast. Shrink images down to a smaller size, then compress them again (or, if they aren't already compressed on your desktop site, just compress them everywhere ). Go to http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ to test how fast your site is.

Good luck!

Kristina

[jesse-landry]

Well I'm battling with this currently; The root of the problem is I'm not sure how it works either way. I'm not really a developer by heart and this is new to me.

Following distilled's flow-chart I ended up with "build a separate mobile," primarily because I want users to convert differently via the mobile site than the other. Also, our primary site is PACKED with text and content and I want to display a much simplified version of this on the mobile. Whereas some of our primary pages have 14 paragraphs on the desktop version, I want 2-3 max on the mobile.

In other words, the messaging will be simplified, streamlined, and targeting a separate conversion. Mobile users don't want to read all that crap, but I will have links to the "full site" on the bottom of each page if it turns out they need more info. Basically I'm assuming the mobile users know what they're looking for and are coming for quick info/conversions/support help.

(the support pages can be responsive I suppose...)

I don't know. Based on what I'm saying, what do you think?

I appreciate the thoughts everybody, as always.

[TheeDigital]

I was about to say the same thing that Matt said, is there a reason why you're looking at a mobile site and not a responsive site?

Responsive sites give companies the flexibility of only managing one site and usually are very SEO friendly.  (You don't have to worry about issues like duplicate content.)

[matbennett]

Google's preferred approach is to have a single site that is responsive to the screen of users - ie it resizes, re-positions and shows/hides different blocks for different resolutions.  They prefer this to a separate mobile site - which isn't a big surprise if you consider how much resource they use crawling websites!

Whether this is the best result for users can be dependent both on how well thought out the approach is, as well as what users are actually looking for.

Here is a useful post from Kristina Kledzik at Distilled weighing up the benefits of each: http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choosing-responsive-or-separate-mobile-site-platform/ (includes handy flow chart)

What else am I missing?

I am quite a heavy user of mobile web.  I'd much rather use a well designed desktop site than a badly designed mobile one.  My biggest (personal) frustrations are:

• Slow. I use the web on the move - I want sites to load quickly
• Dictatorial. If a mobile website sucks I want to use the full version. Don't stop me doing that (as an android user I have an advantage here  - it is very hard to stop me! It is common on the ipad though)
• Too little info. Only really an issue when coupled with the above, but if information is cut back for mobile users then a "view desktop version" becomes even more important
• Small menus/links : Touch screen + fat hands. I want to be able to click stuff
• Not tested on mobile. THIS DRIVES ME NUTS. So many people have mobile or responsive sites then don't test them.  It's surprisingly common to find someone's expensive mobile site totally unusable because of an interstatial ad that you can't remove, or a menu that can't be clicked.
• Speed... I mentioned speed right ??

[jesse-landry]

Can you expand on that last notion?

I understand that I don't want to cram a full site's worth of info onto one mobile design.. My idea is to have a scaled back simplified version of our site with the most popular content covered as well as the blog feed updated and currently pulled from the live site.

What else am I missing?

Thanks to everybody so far you've all been incredibly helpful.

this community

[jesse-landry]

So I was looking at this as it was the top organic google result and got worried when I saw the limitations of a "free" account. It seems to host on a monthly basis and I don't really love that concept. I want to be able to host the site on our own servers in-house. The company is a SaaS company so our login pages will need to be embedded and there are security issues when operating outside of our own servers...

*(I'm already going to have to talk with engineers about the mobile implementation and I just know they'd freak if I told them we were hosting offsite.)

Still I love the simplicity of the formatting and already saw a template I would want to use here... Anybody know of a tool like this I can purchase one-time and host the files on my own server?

[matbennett]

Long term it may well be better/easier to use a simple CMS that has a responsive layout option.

I'm a big fan of Drupal, but the Drupal learning curve is infamously unforgiving if you are new to it. At the other end of the scale is Wordpress, which is about as easy as software adoption gets.  Team that up with a responsive theme and you have something that will allow you to follow best practice at serving users at a variety of resolutions.

Don't forget though : Mobile isn't just about fitting everything on the users screen. In terms of return on effort, the best thing you can do for mobile users is often to make buttons/links bigger and speed up the site.

[jesse-landry]

I did look at that first link briefly and didn't really love the templates they were giving me. Looked pretty cheesy but perhaps there was a way to customize this and I just didn't dig deep enough. Still, the howtogomo link is awesome and I will definitely be bookmarking/referring to this site as I go.

Thanks!

[KevinBudzynski]

If the site is simple and you don't want to spend a ton of resources on it, just create it via: http://www.dudamobile.com/ (has limitations, but can create a site in 5 minutes).

[Kara.Wallace]

Hi Jesse,

Have you already looked at Google's tool for building mobile sites?

This also has some great resources www.howtogomo.com which also is a Google site.

Hope this helps.

Mike