Effective Web Design Tips for the
Touch Generation
As an increasing amount
of commerce continues to make its way to the ubiquitous mobile environment,
web businesses that want to have longevity well into the future
are making sure to make their web designs effective for the generation
that loves to touch as well as those who grew up on the point and
click.
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The top smartphones
all have touchscreens, and the average customer who looks
at a smartphone web site is ready to buy, whether finding
the site direct or from a search engine. It follows that mobile
web design should be geared towards guiding the customer more
quickly to the sale, and also be as search engine optimized
as possible to maximize the visibility of the web site within
its industry.
Designing
a Touch Friendly Web Site
The first thing to consider
when designing a touch friendly web site, especially for the
mobile environment, is to make sure that the appropriate functions
on the web site are touchable.
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For instance, it is
well documented that customers want a phone number and a GPS function
to be touchable on the first screen of a mobile web site. These
apps are called "click to call" and the "map function"
respectively.
Customers also like
to have bigger text on a mobile web site. As well, if text must
scroll, it is much better to scroll vertically than horizontally,
as most smartphones are longer than they are wide when in Web mode.
Therefore, mobile web designers would do well to have no more than
one column of text on the mobile web site, and to make the site
text bigger than would seem normal on a desktop web site.
Links within text
should be easily clickable, which is a function of text size, but
can also be a function of white space around important links. Nothing
is more frustrating than to click unlinked text and not be able
to find your fingering to click the linked text.
Designing an SEO friendly
Web Site
As previously mentioned, consumers
who find a web site via mobile device are ready to buy. As a matter
of fact, many reputable third party market analysts have agreed
that the first listing on a search engine will get 90% of the views
on a mobile environment, and a great majority of those will turn
into sales or physical site visits.
To get an SEO friendly web site in
the mobile world, you must be aware of how people search for things
online. As the smartphone is meant to be a much more intuitive device,
people also search for their queries in a more intuitive way, using
questions and phrases that one might hear in everyday life.
To take advantage of this trend, you
can use the free tools that are given to every business person by
the search engines themselves to look for search phrases which match
more human typing and questioning. Those are the phrases that should
be optimized for within the site (approximately 2 to 4% of the text
should be the phrase itself, with other synonymous keywords taking
up about 5% of the remaining text. There are free online programs
which measure the percentage of phrasing within text.)
Finishing
Touches
A good web site design should also
make sure that the site looks the same on all major operating systems
- Apple, Android, Windows, etc. Make sure that there are not too
many links on a page and that the links that are there lead directly
to a sales page or a contact information page with a click to call
link or a map to a physical address. Mobile users want to move quickly.
Help them do so and watch your sales increase.
Author's Biography Chloe Henderson
is 23 year old media practitioner who engages herself in the world
of social networking, gadgets and reading. She is also doing some
freelance writing on several web hosting companies and is currently
with www.webhostingsearch.com.
She loves to write stuffs about anything that would interest her
and then sharing it to the world wide web. chloe.henderson@webhostgear.com
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