The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web is officially released!

And here is the trailer…

This is the only book you need to get your business ready for the mobile web.

But don’t take my biased word for it, here is what the critics are saying about The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web:

In this nuts-and-bolts book, social media marketing expert Hay (The Social Media Survival Guide) guides the do-it-yourselfer through getting mobile from start to finish, covering everything from style and best practices to creating apps and your own QR codes…direct, no-nonsense…  –Publisher’s Weekly

The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web includes no extraneous text. It’s a practical guide served straight up, an indispensible toolbox crammed with no-nonsense methods and practices for getting your website mobile. The price of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web is a fraction of an hour of tech development—invariably money well spent. Read armed with a highlighter and a notepad…  –NYJournalOfBooks

The mobile web is the BIGGEST opportunity for people to improve their business in the coming years. Deltina Hay has provided the roadmap. Dig in. Now.  –Chris Brogan, President Human Business Works.

If you’re looking for fun anecdotes and fluffy prose you have come to the wrong book. However, if you really need to know how mobile will effect your business and would like to have the tools to be one step ahead of your competition, then you are going to love this book.   –BusinessBookTalk

Get the book now at your favorite bookstore, or check it out at TheBootstrappersGuide.com where you will find many free resources.

Following are some mobile website best practices paraphrased from the book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web, by Deltina Hay.

1. Keep It Simple:
In general, keeping your site simple means eliminating most images; simplifying navigation, layout, and design elements; eliminating Flash and other proprietary software; keeping your site free of clutter; and breaking up text and other content.

2. Prioritize Content:
Space is in high demand on a mobile site and site visitors are on the go, so you need to anticipate what content users will most likely want to access. Choose the three most important content items and make those items easy for users to find and act upon.

Prioritized Content and Conversion on a Mobile Landing Page: Google Sites

3. Focus on Conversion:
Recall that users are not browsing your mobile site—make it easy for them to do the things they are most likely wanting to do, like find store locations, buy or review products, review menu items, place calls to your business, or request additional information.

4. Take Advantage of Mobile Features:
Like the click-to-call button, there are features specific to mobile devices that can be used to improve your site user experience. The most useful of these features is location, both yours and the customer’s. By accessing user location information, you can offer a more personable experience.

5. Think “Tap-able” not “Clickable:”
Design your site’s buttons, navigation items, and links for touch screens, not for a mouse. This will improve the user experience and prevent accidental navigation away from your site. Do not use hover-over features on your mobile site. A thumb cannot “hover” over an item on a mobile site.

"Tap-able" Design from goMobi

6. Navigation: Go Vertical
Pay special attention to the navigation on your mobile website. Keep in mind the “tap-able” issues discussed above, as well as scrolling and readability issues. Your navigation menu should not scroll left or right. If your menu items are too long to fit horizontally, create a vertical navigation structure.

Vertical Navigation: Responsive Website

7. Minimize Scrolling
Mobile users prefer to scroll from top to bottom, so design your site so that left to right scrolling is eliminated. You should keep the need for scrolling—even top to bottom scrolling—to a minimum.

8. Formatting Content: Be Concise
Content is still king, even on the mobile web, and there are plenty of ways to keep your valuable content available to your visitors while still maintaining a simple, readable, and error-free mobile site:

• Make headers prominent and concise.
• Text should be readable at arm’s length, and broken up with “read more” links or collapsible navigation.
• Use bulleted lists when formatting your text, and avoid the use of images wherever possible.
• Avoid placing too many links within the body of your text, especially if the links are close together.

Collapsible navigation: From Design Chemical

9. Focus on Simple Usability
Your mobile website design should focus on simplicity and usability. Designing for a smaller screen can be challenging, and requires eliminating many elements we take for granted on desktop sites. The following best practices can help:

• Do not clutter your site with paid ads or unnecessary elements.
• Use CSS to organize content on your mobile site. Do not use HTML tables.
• Use plenty of white space on your site, and use lighter colored backgrounds.
• Single column layouts are the best choice for mobile websites.

Concise and simple formatting: WordPress plugin, Wapple Architect

10. Beware of Proprietary Technologies
Be careful when choosing proprietary software to use on your mobile site. Many smartphones and tablets will not render Flash or Silverlight, which are programs that help create animation and other multimedia for the web. You may run into issues with third-party scripts as well.

11. Page Size Matters
Page load time (how fast a page renders in a mobile browser) plays a major role in how well a site places in mobile search engines, and can also determine if someone stays on your site or not. A website designed for desktop browsers can take up to 40 seconds to load on a mobile device, a far cry from an optimized mobile site that should take around four seconds.

12. Crunch Those Images!
Fast load times are essential to an optimized mobile site, and images tend to take a long time to load. Mobile users are content motivated—they are not necessarily “browsing” or “admiring” your mobile site, rather, they are there for a purpose. A few images are fine, but excessive use will degrade your site’s efficiency. Use an image cruncher like crunch4Free to cut back on image size.

13. Video: Use YouTube and HTML5 to Render
Just as for images, including video on your mobile site can affect load times and usability. And even though smartphones and tablets handle audio and video very efficiently, the mobile browser rendering your mobile website may not do such a good job. Rather than streaming the video yourself or relying on other proprietary software, consider using YouTube to place video on your mobile site. HTML5 has a video tag that renders video efficiency as well.

Embedded YouTube video: WordPress mobile site

14. URL Structure
You have a few choices for what type of URL to use for your mobile site. You could purchase a domain name using the “dotmobi” or “.mobi” extension so your site would have a URL like “yoursitename.mobi.” Or, you could point a sub-domain name like “m.yoursitename.com” or “mobile.yoursitename.com” to your mobile website. It is becoming standard to find a website’s mobile version at a URL like m.example.com.

15. Redirecting Visitors to Your Mobile Site: Let Them Choose
When someone accesses your website using a mobile device, there are ways you can make sure the mobile version of your site is what they see. One way is to redirect them to the mobile version of your website using scripts. Regardless of how you redirect visitors to your mobile site, it is always best to allow them the option of viewing the standard version of the site if they choose.

16. Test Your Mobile Site:
Mobile browsers are not as forgiving as desktop browsers when it comes to errors. The best place to test your mobile website for errors is the W3C mobileOK Checker. This tool not only checks your site for errors, but checks page sizes, load times, image sizes, and many other factors that can keep your mobile site from displaying properly in mobile browsers.

So, what CAN you do on your mobile website?

I know what you are thinking: What is left to do with all those limitations? Granted, these guidelines are pretty strict, and many of them have older mobile devices in mind. However, you should still attempt to adhere as closely as possible to the suggestions here when developing your mobile website. The mobile audience has a shorter attention span than ever, so every second counts!

There is still a lot you can do to create a beautiful mobile website while adhering to best practices. Check out the sites on Mobile Awesomeness for inspiration. Note: Not every mobile site featured on Mobile Awesomeness adheres to the best practices discussed in this post.

Mobile Awesomeness

This post is paraphrased from the book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web, by Deltina Hay.

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Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at SocialMediaPower.com, SocialMedia.biz, and Technorati. Deltina teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube.

In previous articles, we discuss why you need a mobile website, how people use the mobile web, and steps for planning your mobile website. But none of that tells you how to create your mobile website, or what your options are. Luckily, you have a host of solutions available to get your web presence mobile-ready, with many of them taking very little time, effort, or money to implement.

If you have HTML experience, you can use responsive web design to create separate style sheets without the need to alter your existing website code, or use new web standards found in HTML5 and CSS3 to create your mobile website from scratch.

There are also some nice HTML5 mobile website frameworks and templates available to help you kick start your efforts and stay compliant.

But don’t despair if you do not have web programming experience. There are many tools and services you can use to create a successful mobile web presence. Many of these solutions require very little time or money.

You should know the difference between a conversion service and a hosting (or DIY) service before you decide on your solution. Conversion services take your existing website and convert it to a mobile website. DIY services allow you to create a separate mobile website tailored specifically to the mobile audience. I talk about both these methods, the pros an cons of each, and how to choose the solution that best fits your needs in The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web.

The Bootstrapper’s Guide website has a good list of mobile website conversion services and mobile website creation or DIY services for you to check out and compare if you are ready to dig right in.

If your website is powered by a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal there are specific mobile solutions available. Mobile plugins, responsive themes, and hosting services can all help get your CMS mobile-ready.

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Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at SocialMediaPower.com, SocialMedia.biz, and Technorati. Deltina teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube.

But before leaping in and creating a mobile website just because you need one, pull back and plan for a mobile site that meets your customer’s needs, fulfills your business objectives, and integrates the features you need now and in the future.

Here are some guidelines to help you plan a successful mobile website:

1. Plan For User Expectations

In a previous post, we discussed how people use the mobile web. Mobile device users already know what they want when they get to a mobile website,  and are more likely to take action once they get there. To plan for this type of user behavior, answer the following questions about potential visitors to your mobile site:

• Why are they most likely coming to your site?
• What information are they most likely seeking?
• What types of actions are they most likely to take?

The answers to these questions can help you prioritize the content on your mobile site. You should highlight the three most important items and make them prevalent on your site. You may only have a few seconds to make a conversion, so call-to-action links or buttons should be one of those priorities.

If possible, reach out to your mailing list or social networking connections and ask what they would like to see on your mobile site.

2. Plan For Business Objectives

Mobile visitors are not going to navigate around your site the way they might on a PC, so have your immediate goals in mind when planning your mobile website. You should also consider the resources you have to put toward your mobile website. Answer the following questions about your goals and resources:

• What are my immediate goals: Sell products, drive traffic to my location, generate leads?
• How much money do I have to invest in the set up and maintenance of a mobile website?
• How much time can I put toward the set up and maintenance of the site?

Answering these questions can help you focus your mobile website content and decide on the most feasible overall solution.

3. Plan For Mobile Features

We learned that mobile device users:

• Access social media sites second only to search sites
• Take action more often than PC users
• Are location motivated
• Like to share information

Using this insight, you want to include features on your mobile website that will encourage mobile device users to share your content, contact your business, access your social media sites, find your business, and so forth. Depending on the results of steps one and two above, consider the following features to include on your mobile website:

• Click-to-call functionality
• Links to your social media accounts
• “Check-in” links for location-based services (like Yelp, Google Places, and foursquare)
• Google Maps
• Ability to SMS (text message) your business

This is not an exhaustive list, but should give you an idea of the types of features to consider for your mobile website.

These steps can help you flesh out the information you need to move forward with your mobile website strategy.

This excerpt was paraphrased from The Boostrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web by Deltina Hay. Learn more about the book at The Bootstrapper’s Guide website.

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Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at SocialMediaPower.com, SocialMedia.biz, and Technorati. Deltina teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube.

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Your site visitors can easily save your website as a shortcut on their smartphone or tablet, keeping your content as top-of-mind as their mobile apps.

The problem is that many of your site visitors may not know how to create a mobile shortcut, so you should offer instructions on how they can. There are any number of ways to do this: You can offer a link to a page with instructions or place a short video on your site showing how they can create a shortcut on their mobile device.

Here is a short video on how to create a mobile shortcut that you are welcome to embed on your own site:

Creating your own mobile shortcut icons

I’m sure your next question is going to be: How did you get the mobile devices to use those nifty little shortcut icons to represent your website? And a good question that is!

The first step is to create the icon. Create your icon as a .png file that is at least 128px by 128px (this size will accommodate newer mobile devices, too). Check out the ICONJ iPhone Style Icon Generator if you want a quick solution to creating icons.

Next, name the icon “apple-touch-icon.png” and place the icon file in the root directory of your website.

This is all you need to do to accommodate Apple devices, but you need to add some code to your site to accommodate other devices like Android mobile devices.

Add the following code to the head section of every page you want the icon to represent as a mobile shortcut icon:

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/apple-touch-icon.png" />
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="/apple-touch-icon.png" />

Once you add the icon file and code, mobile devices will use your icon as the shortcut icon.

You can take the process a bit further by adding an automation script but I only recommend doing this for full-fledged web apps or fully mobile-optimized sites.

This post is based on the book The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web, which will be released in May 2012, but you can get a review copy from the author today.

This post first appeared at SocialMedia.biz.

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Deltina Hay is the author of The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web and The Social Media Survival Guide. She is a veteran developer and programmer with over 25 years experience. She also blogs at SocialMediaPower.com, SocialMedia.biz, and Technorati. Deltina teaches the graduate level social media certificate course for Drury University. You may also enjoy her video tutorials on YouTube.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to our RSS feed.