What should you include on your mobile website?

I recently had to answer this question as Web Point Oh! went through the process of creating a mobile version of its website. What content and imagery did I really want to include on our mobile site?

To answer that question, I first had to decide who the mobile site was going to be for and what technology would I use to build it. Let's start with the "who"; I knew it would be my same core target audience as with my main website, except that those users would have a different agenda. If they were using their phone to access my site, they were looking for either a way to contact my company or directions. Or it could be that the user found the website while browsing on her phone and just wants to read a brief overview of what Web Point Oh! is all about. Therefore, I decided that I didn't need a mirror of my main website, but more of a summary and an easy way to contact my team and an even easier way to get directions to our office.

Now I needed to tackle the technology issue. Web Point Oh! has a content management system called Oh!SoSimple, therefore I knew we would be using our own tool, but how? There were two options that became apparent to us. One would be that as you created a page for your main website, you could also have that same page automatically copied and formatted for the mobile site. The second option, and the one I went with, is that you have a completely different part of the CMS where you create and manage the mobile website. I choose this option because of how I answered the "who" question and decided I wanted more control over these pages to have separate content and images for the mobile site.

The final technology piece was to determine what phones we would optimize the mobile website for and which we wouldn't. Again, going back to our target audience of marketers and business owners, we decided that smartphones would be our baseline; that we weren't concerned with every single cell phone on the market. We also decided to use a "sniffer" to detect the site visitor's operating system, so that we would not have to market the mobile website separately. I.E. instead of telling the world about our main website at WebptOh.com and our mobile website and m.WebptOh.com, we just market the WebptOh.com site and our technology will server up the appropriate version.

Okay, now that I had determined the mobile version would be different from the main website, I had to determine how would it be different. A big decision was that I choose to not use any images, other than our logo in the header of each page. I also choose to have a very simple navigation structure in the header and to include a link that could take the visitor to our main website and would override the "sniffer" to allow her to view that site on her phone. I included just enough pages and content to convey a strong sense of what my company is all about and how it can help the site visitor with her Internet marketing needs. I then made sure to integrate our social media options, such as the Facebook "Like" button into the footer of each page. Finally, I included our contact form on every page as the call to action that I feel is so important to include in all of our communications.

The last step was to include a link on the Contact page that would take the visitor directly to our Google Places page to access an interactive map and directions to our office.

If you would like to see this in action (and please provide feedback on what you think or the experiences you have had on this topic) please visit our website at WebptOh.com.

If you have questions, please contact Ken Sabey by phone (303.506.3406) or email (Ken@WebptOh.com).