Mobile Friendly

I haven’t gone back to Facebook advertising since I wrote my heartbreak piece about it over a year ago.  I may try them again soon to promote a couple of new, non-phone-app products we have in the works.  In the meantime I came across this remarkable infographic.  It says:

• nothing about how well the ads are working for the advertisers,
• a lot about how increasingly mobile our readers and users are becoming, and
• an enormous amount about how well ads are doing as revenue generators for Facebook.

DOT Placards Before

DOT Placards After

Note:  This is the somewhat techie version of this story.  If you don’t maintain your own website, you’re probably interested in the more business-oriented version here.

Having checked out our various web sites using both our own mobile devices and the nice HowToGoMo tool that I wrote about previously, it was pretty easy to decide that we needed to invest some time in trying to increase our sites’ mobile friendliness.  And it was easy to decide where to start. Read the rest of this entry »

Sherprog After WPTouch

Sherprog Before WPTouch

I started writing a post about how easy it was for us to convert our two simplest websites to be mobile friendly.  It was pretty easy and you can see the big difference it makes.  But the details are probably only of interest to folks who have something of a DIYer relationship with their website(s).  If that’s you, check out my How easy was it? write-up.

However, if, like most business people, you had someone else build your website, you’re almost certainly going to have someone else make your mobile-friendly modifications, too.  So for you, the questions are more:  What should I expect, in terms of time and money?  How do I know if the person I’m talking is honest, competent, and going to do a good job?

Read the rest of this entry »

Should you be investing in your website to make it more ‘mobile friendly’?

The simple answer is undoubtedly YES.  The market for smartphones and tablets is exploding.  A study on cell phone usage by the Pew Research Center, published in the spring of 2011, stated: “One third of American adults (35%) own a smartphone of some kind, and these users take advantage of a wide range of their phones’ capabilities. . . . eight in ten use their phone to go online.”  By October of the same year, a Nielson study claimed, while “only [italics mine] 43 percent of all US mobile phone subscribers own a smartphone . . . the vast majority of those under the age of 44 now have smartphones. In fact, 62 percent of mobile adults aged 25-34 report owning smartphones. And among those 18-24 and 35-44 years old the smartphone penetration rate is hovering near 54 percent.”

But how bad is your site right now?  What do you need to do to make it better?  And what’s it going to cost in time and money?

Read the rest of this entry »