Now is the time to make your site iPhone-friendly
By iPhone-friendly, I’m not talking about creating a wholesale ‘mobile’ version of your site. I’m talking about auditing your current site to see if you can cut down on some of the trim that might make it load a little quicker on a 3G (or EDGE) connection. The following are a couple of things you can do to make your website be a little more mobile / iPhone-friendly:
- Take a look at the images on your site. If you’re finding the file size to be a little hefty, look into perhaps squeezing down the quality a little and shorting up the download time for the image.
- Your site is, essentially, built around providing one big sales path. Help users continue upon this path in a way you want them to by providing call-outs to the ‘next-step’ along this funnel at the end of the content or on the sidebar of the current page they’re on. Make these links / graphics ‘tap-friendly’ for iPhone users.
- Provide your contact phone number somewhere easily seen on your site. Often, iPhones will make a phone number ‘tappable’ on the page. Give iPhone & mobile web users an easy way to contact you directly this way.
Even if your product or service website isn’t something you think an iPhone or general mobile web user would possibly want to access on their device, the percentage of users who use the mobile web to access content is rising. The new version of the iPhone – coming July 11 equipped with G3 speed – will only increase our mobile web surfing habits. Better strike while the iron is getting warmed up…
I wonder what iphone’s market share is on mobile web surfing?
Mobiles will be used more frequently for the Internet and purchases there’s no doubt.
In Japan they already have TV and credit card facilities on their mobiles. In the UK there are plans for TV on mobiles which means that infrastructure will be improving.
Good advice – I’m off to tweak some jpegs…
Actually it’s not a bad idea to follow all three of these suggestions when developing any website. At White Rose Productions we have been developing sites for years using these “rules”. You can never make your site too easy for your users, iPhone or full size computer. Thanks Christian for reminding us we are building sites for users not monuments to our self.
It kind of blows already having to make websites compliant to the majority of browsers, user-friendly to those with slower connections, slower…more outdated computers…now mobile phone devices?
Even I optimize my sites for all type of internet users. I don’t like heavy images because they have very bad effects on loading the site. I use thumbnails frequently though.