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Mobile friendly. It\'s a term that gets thrown around a lot in web design circles, but beyond the talk of responsive and adaptive design and breakpoints and whatever, what does it actually mean?
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This is Clickstarter, the Australian Digital Marketing Podcast. I\'m Dante St James.
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Being mobile-friendly is a big thing now for a lot of website owners. Well, to be honest, it\'s been a big thing since around 2012 when we noticed that more people were accessing the web from their phones than ever before. Fast forward to the 2020s and mobile is by far the most used device with anything to do with the internet.
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So what exactly is mobile-friendliness?
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Basically, if a website is \\u2018mobile friendly\\u2019 it means it is optimised for readers using phones and tablets to access the content.
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These devices typically don\\u2019t have a large screen for reading like a laptop or desktop computer has and so there are times when you want to provide a way for your readers to access your post without scrolling endlessly past decorative images, logos, ads and forms to get to the actual content.
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So what do you need to make sure your website is \\u2018mobile friendly\\u2019?
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Typically there are two things.
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Firstly you should make sure there is a menu with links to all your most important pages. Just like you have on a desktop site. But it\'s a little different on mobile because the menu is presented vertically, so submenu items make a menu really long and quite unusable. So you have to reduce the depth of your menus, especially if you have a lot of pages.
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Secondly, you should have a \\u2018mobile optimised\\u2019 version of each post or article.
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This mobile optimised version of a post of the article is, in short, shorter. You get to the point faster. You cover your points using short, sharp dot points, and you get your reader into your page, informed and out quickly. There\'s no point trying to make them linger, because it\'s mobile. They\'re not going to do that.
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If you\'re not comfortable making super-short mobile styled articles, then do both a long-form and short-form version of the post. From the short form, link to the long version for those who might want to read more deeply into the topic. The advantage here is that you get twice the content on each topic, so you\'re giving Google even more SEO juice.
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And ultimately, that is what you\'re writing a blog for, true?
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Want to learn more about digital marketing? Hit the LEARN tab at clickstarter.com.au. And together we\'ll help your business to get known, get found and stay known.
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