5 Tips & Best Practices for Building Premium Mobile Websites

Over the past few months we’ve had the pleasure of working with mobile resellers from across the globe who’ve helped us gather valuable insights into what works best when developing premium mobile websites. Below is a list of tips and best practices to take into consideration when building premium mobile websites for clients in various industries with brick&mobile’s Mobile CMS platform:

1. KISS – Keep it Short and Sweet

Your premium mobile website should be easier to use and contain less information than your desktop site. Eliminating unneeded graphic elements from your site is usually an effective way to optimize its display on a mobile device. Our research shows that the top 4 things mobile web users are looking for on a mobile site is:

[list_item]Phone number[/list_item]

[list_item]Hours of Operation[/list_item]

[list_item]Quote/Discounts/Offers[/list_item]

[list_item]Company Location[/list_item]

So Keep it Short and Sweet and give your users what they want, quickly and easily!

2. Give users the option of visiting the standard site

It’s always best practice to link your mobile site to a customer’s desktop site to give the end-user an option of which site they prefer to browse. This can be easily accomplished in our Mobile CMS by simply adding a URL in the “General” section of a mobile site setup. If you leave this field empty it will not display the “Switch to Desktop” link in the footer of your mobile site.

3. Use a separate mobile theme

Often we see that resellers get caught up in trying to replicate a customer’s desktop site. In most cases this is not always the best route to take. Using a customer’s logo and colour scheme is usually the best way of keeping your customers “brand” consistent with their mobile site, but there is no rule of thumb that says it has to be an exact match. In fact the opposite is true. We notice that the best premium mobile sites are the ones that take the best “elements” from the desktop sites and convert them to work on mobile.

4. Minimize the use of images

It’s always important to only use the images your mobile site needs to get its message across. Logos, backgrounds and icons are an exception, but you should try an avoid using images as space filler, as most of the time these images won’t display the way you think they will on a mobile site. Always keep into consideration your image file sizes as you want to ensure you don’t use large images that may slow down your premium mobile website.

5. Include as much content from your desktop site that is practical

Another common mistake is to “overpopulate” your mobile site with the same content as displayed on your desktop site. In some cases this may be needed as per your clients request but in most cases you can always take the important pieces of information that will effectively get your message across clearly.

Using these tips and best practices will help you design optimized premium mobile websites that your customers are sure to love and gives you the ability to make a nice profit on each premium mobile site you sell!

Click to find out more about brick&mobile’s Mobile CMS or Mobile Business in a Box solutions.