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
-
Does adding new pages, new slugs, new URLS in a site affects rankings and visibility?
hi reader, i have decided to add new pages to my site. if i add new urls, i feel like i have to submit the sitemap again. my question is, does submitting sitemap again with new slugs or urls affects visibility is serps, if yes, how do i minimize the impact?
Web Design | | SIMON-CULL0 -
HELP! IE secure page display issue on new live site
For some reason IE 7, 8, & 9 do not display the following page: https://www.jwsuretybonds.com/protools.htm All they show is the Norton seal. It shows properly in all other browsers without issue (including IE 10+), but the earlier versions flash the page for a split second, then hides everything. Can someone shed some light on this? This is a new live site we just launched minutes ago and these browsers account for 12% of our overall traffic. UGH I hate you microsoft!!! Thanks all 🙂
Web Design | | TheDude0 -
Getting a highly ranked site a better result for 1 search term
I have a highly ranked website for a niche category. My site ranks higher in SEOMOZ than all of my competitors, but I can't get any higher than 4th on a page for one specific search term. What can I do to help my site increase its ranking on a specific search term?
Web Design | | tadden0 -
How to link to a site without passing ANY linkjuice (other than simply nofollowing)
I have heard that there are other ways of linking to a site, to completely avoid passing any seo value I think it was even in a whiteboard friday video where I saw Rand say something about doing a 307 "temporary" redirect, or something like that? Basically, I want to let my customers compare our prices with ebay, but I don't want to have ebay outrank us (for obvious reasons) Any help?
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
How many sites on one hosting account?
How many sites is safe to house on one hosting provider? I use BlueHost and they advertise unlimited domains, but I'm not sure what the negative side effects might be from hosting too many on one hosting service. If it matter at all, I'm using WordPress to build my sites. Pros and Cons?
Web Design | | leafndrop0 -
How will a sites ranking be affected??
Hey guys, My MD has just put this to me, we have a site the is currently ranked in top 3 for all there chosen search terms. The company is undergoing an overhaul of their design and want a new site to match this. They have asked how changing the site design will affect their rankings. More content is going to be added with this there will be new pages links etc Any information would be greatly appreciated.. Thanks Anthony
Web Design | | Anthonykal-group0 -
Mobile Web Sites
Hi I have started offering customers a mobile app view of their existing websites using sencha touch which works well. On visiting the website if a user visits via a mobile device they access the mobile app view of the site. I am looking for some best practice please - as many of the customers already have hosting with their existing website so would it be possible to use a subdomain of m.theirdomain.com which will point to the mobile website which will be hosted on our servers in the cloud. Or is the only alternative to use a subdomain for their mobile sites because they are hosted with us in the cloud of businessname.ourdomain.com ? Many Thanks
Web Design | | ocelot0 -
Suggestions For My Ecommerce Site
I am starting to work on an ecommerce site that I am part owner of. My partner who is the other owner started the site a while back and because he has no internet marketing experience the site didn't come out very well. I am currently overhauling the site and here is a list of things first on my list so I can at least get started on some seo and even ppc. I would really appreciate it if you could take a look at our store and see if you think I am missing anything or you could suggest anything else that really should be done immediately or something that is wrong. The site is www.clubfitnesswarehouse.com Update magento to newest version Fix url structure to be SEO friendly for homepage, category pages, product pages etc. For an example of a site that has great seo friendly urls please refer to examples on http://www.bigfitness.com/ site. For example these pages. http://www.bigfitness.com/treadmillstore.html , http://www.bigfitness.com/bosplincy.html , Remove top navigation menu and instead create left sidebar navigation menu created to navigate site and products. For example of these types of sidebars please refer to sidebar on http://www.bigfitness.com/ or http://www.americanfitness.net/ We will NOT be using same structure as what is in top navigation currently. Categories and keywords of categories will be changed and some will stay the same structure as is currently in navigation For header we would like to feature our shipping policy, returns, privacy policy, no sales tax etc. For example I have seen that I like refer to http://www.spiderofficechairs.com/ Obviously we do not want to copy but something similar for our own site. All images on homepage must be changed to include clickable txt so google can read text not just pictures. We would also like product pages modified to make more user friendly and conversion increased. Add to cart button needs to be changed, text needs to be brighter instead of dull grey color. Add to cart button must also be moved ABOVE THE FOLD! Also on product pages we would like to add sections in addition to Product Description, of Specs, and About section for each product page. We also need the ability to change this information as needed when we need to.
Web Design | | PEnterprises0