Is your website mobile optimized? By making sure your website is ready for the mobile traffic already visiting, you’ll want to review these 7 points to give users the best experience.
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Mobile responsive
When a visitor loads your website on their mobile device, does the site scale to fit that evice? Avoid expecting users to pinch & zoom or squint at their screens. They won’t. They’ll just move on.
To easily test this out, grab the side of your internet browser on a desktop and make it very skinny. You should see the items resizing themselves automatically.
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Media visible
Does all the media on your website display or play properly? Flash elements were all the rage but no longer work well. Flash isn’t visible on iOS devices, and will stop being supported on Android devices. Make sure that if you include media on your website that it will play on a mobile device.
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Does media scale?
When someone loads your page, is the Youtube video half off the screen? When properly coded, your theme should scale the video. However, not all theme developers adhere to the standards that would support scaling.
Likewise, any other form of media, whether an image or an embedded pdf, should fit to the width of the device in horizontal and landscape modes.
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Action oriented – click to call & email
Near the top of your website should be your business phone number, with a click-to-call option enabled. This will help mobile phone visitors easily press a link to place a call. The code to make it click to call would look like:
<a href=”tel:8005551212″>Click to call 800-555-1212</a>
Likewise, your email should open an email program. You’ll want to add some code or a plugin to your website to obfuscate the address, preventing an open invitation for spam.
<a href=”mailto:someone@example.com?Subject=Hello%20again”>Send Mail</a>
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Thumb ready?
Can you navigate the entire website with your thumbs? Think here about the navigation bar, search box, email opt-in form, blog titles, etc.
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Readable?
How is your font size on smaller mobile screens? Often it works well to use font larger than you may have been used to for the past few years. I like 14pt for body text, and up to 24 for title text.
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Social Sharing?
While I like using a floating sidebar for social sharing icons, like Google+, it is also good to duplicate it into the footer of your blog post so that mobile viewers can see it. Floating sidebar buttons often aren’t visible on the screen.
