Our research found that 74% of prominent Australian websites do not have an adequate mobile web presence. So we thought Australian organisations might need a helping hand. Here are ten tips that you can apply when working on your mobile strategy.

1. Be discreet with ads on your mobile site. Users say that advertising creates visual noise and clutters up a web page. Advertising on a mobile site would use scarce real estate that may detract from your content.
2. Remember that it’s not just teenagers who use mobile internet devices.  Research shows that people aged 40+ are still high users of the internet through smartphones, and these figures are set to continue rising.
3. Ensure your contact telephone numbers are formatted to enable a user to tap and call. Email addresses should invoke the native smartphone email client so that users do not have to copy and paste contact information.
4. Help people find your business location by including a “get directions from my current location” function. You can take advantage of the mobile nature of a smartphone by integrating your site with a map from Whereis or Google.
5. Ensure users can zoom in on images. Users will often want to expand an image to see it in more detail, so it’s a good idea to make this as easy as possible for them. One site on which this could be improved is eBay.com. While eBay has provided a site optimised for the mobile experience, it’s impossible to zoom in on many of the product photos through a smartphone.
6. Keep at least 15 pixels of white space above and below the link so that it can be easily tapped. Links are small, and a user will often need to zoom in on the page to select the link. Often, a person’s fingertip will be too large to select the right link, and they may accidentally select the wrong one.
7. Buttons should be about 30 pixels in height. Use them for navigating around a mobile site. It’s too easy (and infuriating) to accidentally select the wrong button on a smartphone. Make sure your buttons are quite large so people can easily touch them without having to zoom in on the screen.
8. Check your site stats. Check your site analytics to see how many and what type of mobile devices are being used to access your site and make sure your site works well on the most commonly used devices. Also, compare your current mobile device statistics from the last year. Expect numbers to increase exponentially over the next couple of years.
9. Make sure your site is accessible. All online products should be built to ensure that they can be used by people who use different devices to access the web. For example, a website can be accessed with a mobile phone, a tablet, or a screen reader (people with vision impairments often use screen readers rather than monitors to navigate, which read the content of a web page aloud). Building an accessible site maximises the number of different devices that will be able to access your site.
10. Set up a redirect to your mobile site. If you’ve gone to the effort of building a mobile friendly site or app, make sure you set up a redirect to ensure it’s displayed to mobile devices. This is a simple script that detects which browser and device is accessing the site, and ensures that the mobile site is displayed to mobile browsers. Sound pretty obvious? Apparently not. Our research indicates that half of mobile-specific websites do not have a redirect in place.

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