Building a Mobile Site: Tools?
-
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!
-
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
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
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.)
-
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 ??
-
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
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
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).
-
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
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Have you changed 100's of links on your site? Tell me the why's, the how's and what's!
Hello there. If you've changed 100's of links, then I'd like for you to contribute to this thread. I've created a new URL structure for a website with 500+ posts in an effort to make it more user friendly, and more accessible to crawlers. I was just about to pull the trigger, when I started reading up on the subject and found that I might have a few surprises waiting for me around the corner. The status of my site. 500 posts 10 different categories 50+ tags No Backlinks No recent hits (according to Google Analytics) No rankings. I'm going to keep roughly 75% of the posts, and put them in different (new) categories to strengthen SEO for the topic which I'd like to rank multiple categories for, and also sorted a list with content which I'd like to 410. Created new structure created new categories Compiled list of old URLs, and new URLs New H1, Meta Title & Descriptions New tags It looks simple on paper, but I've got problems executing it. **Question 1. **What do I need to keep in mind when deleting posts, categories, and tags - besides 410, Google URL removal? Question 2. What do I do with all the old posts that I am going to re-direct? Each post has between 10-15 internal links. I've started manually removing each link in old posts before 301'ing them. The reason I'm doing this is control the UX, as well as internal link juice to strengthen main categories. Am I on the right path? On a side note, I've prepared for the 301'ing by changing the H1's, meta data and adding alt text to images. But I can't help but to think that just deleting the old posts, and copying over the content to the new url (with the original dates set) would be a better alternative. Any contribution to this thread would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Web Design | | Dan-Louis1 -
What To Do When Improved Site Speed & Layout Result In Higher Bounce Rates & Lower Time On Site
We launched a new Bootstrap 3.0 site template 2 weeks ago. The site loads 5x faster and has a much improved layout (utilizing most common above the fold recommendations ). It's only been two weeks, but our bounce rate has increased 5-10% and our avg time on site decreased by 10-18%. Here is the page for one of our most common products so you can see the general experience: <a>http://www.jwsuretybonds.com/surety-bonds/commercial-bonds/auto_dealer_bond.htm</a> (here is the old version: <a>http://199.119.123.134/surety-bonds/commercial-bonds/auto_dealer_bond.htm</a>) We spent two months implementing the new design and working on a speedy load time. We had anticipated a drastic improvement, not mild downturn in user behavior. I'm hopeful that the Analytics metrics aren't showing the true picture on the keywords we care about (can't see anymore due to "Not Provided" listed as most keywords now. Argh!) and perhaps some of the more important/accurate user behavior metrics that we can't see are improving. We know our industry and our clients needs VERY well. We THOUGHT our new content/layout was perfect so it will be tough for us to try to make improvements at this point. We believe our best plan of action now is to add more content on each page and A/B test it along with other subtle changes. The problem is that our new content is very concise and hits on all of the primary visitor intentions, so additions of content could be redundant and making concise answers more "fluffy", which is what we tried to get away from. What do you think? Is there reason for panic? What would your plan of attack be if your "sure shot" new design didn't provide the improvements you "knew" it would? 🙂
Web Design | | TheDude0 -
How to submit or build website like this?
Hello Experts, how to submit website like this flow, i mean how can we show our home, about us, services and contact us page like this in search engine 14dcx86.png
Web Design | | JulieWhite0 -
How important is w3c validation for mobile sites???
So mobile sites are all the rave, but how many are doing it correctly and with all the different options which is correct or the best? For example I have a guy telling me that the mobile site must validate here http://validator.w3.org/mobile/ or here http://ready.mobi/launch.jsp?locale=en_EN However I have run many so called mobile sites like nike (m.nike.com) and those built by dudamobiles and all dramatically fail the above tests! Responsive is another key element of web design and the guys at twitter came up with bootstrap, so I ran these sites through the above validators and all have failed. I take this site as an example from ilovebootstrap.com, please note this is not my site but was top of thelist on here. Mobi Ready 2 / 5 - result poor mobile experience Results from google pagespeed Mobile 62 / 100 Desktop 83 / 100 So while it looks good on mobile devices it does not score well If you look at the google site: http://www.howtogomo.com/en-gb/d/why-get-mo/ The case studies listed all fail the validation tests, so my question is is it worth getting our mobile sites validated and will this affect rankings?
Web Design | | iprosoftware0 -
URL Designing and Site Architecture
Hi, 1. At the end of the URL, should we have "/" or not (for e.g. my website www.example.com/abc/) 2. What is the optimum level of site depth 3. Google crawler will go through the breadcrumb or url (If a page is at 6th level through breadcrumb and at 4th level through URL, at which level will google crawler recognize this.
Web Design | | adiez12340 -
Avoiding duplicate content with multi-lagusage site
Hi, We have a client in China that is looking to create three versions of the same website, English, Chinese and Korean. They do not want to use a translation plugin like Google translate, preferring to have the pages duplicated. What is the best way to do this bearing in mind that the site needs to be found in all three languages. Would also appreciate if anyone knows of a good hosting company that has English support on the Chinese main land. Thanks Fraser
Web Design | | fraserhannah0 -
SEO tricks for a one page site with commented html content
Hi, I am building a website that is very similar to madebysofa.com : means it is one page site with entire content loaded (however are commented in html) and by clicking on sections it modify the DOM to make specific section visible. It is very interesting from UX point of view but as far as I know, since this way most of my content is always commented and hidden from crawlers, I will loose points regarding SEO. Is there any workaround you can recommend or you think sites like madebysofa.com are doomed to loose SEO points by nature? Best regards,
Web Design | | Ashkan10 -
What is Best Platform to Build Website - SEO in mind
Hello... I am going to be creating two new websites shortly that will need to be built with SEO in mind. These will not be e-commerce sites, but instead will be informational with a couple pages of content on each. One will be used to get people to input their contact info and that info will be sent to our call center where we will call them back from. The other site will be heavily used for graphics, but still needs to have room for content (seo purposes)... Can you guys please recommend what platform i should have these sites written on (and please remember I need to do this on whatever is the most SEO-Friendly)... Thanks
Web Design | | Prime850