Social media savvy?

I learnt an important lesson today people, and one I should have learned about a long time ago!

I use WIX for my website - It's not the best but it's functional, and it's free for the first year. (I'll issue a slight warning here, clever marketing on Wix's part because year two can get expensive - they've lured you in, you get to learn it's functionality and then boom, price hike! But, in all fairness, it is not too expensive if you don't have the e-commerce version).

Anyway, as the site has built and expanded, and as I've learned to use some of the features, I discovered that the automated 'mobile' app isn't quite so automated - dammit. Since I've been adding reviews and write ups I haven't been checking my websites mobile phone friendliness - today I discovered that it really wasn't that friendly.

Fortunately, it's not a difficult fix, just meant spending a few hours on the site and changing a lot. Things to remember with the mobile version of your site:

1. Data usage. Mobile devices use heaps of data, and the more you have on the mobile version of your site the more data it will use to download.

2. Smart phones come in various shapes and sizes, and processor speeds, so downloading can be a bad experience for the end user if there is too much content being downloaded. 

3. Stick to the interesting stuff - you don't have the luxury of being able to cover your mobile version of your website in pretty banners, flowery pictures or stuff like that IF it isn't relevant to the bullet points you're trying to get across. Too much equals too slow! So create a trimmed down version.

4. Simple (and obvious now) regularly check on your own smart phone, see what your customers are seeing.

There are other things to consider - the data network that is available in your area (3G, 4G etc), the size of the handsets display and, lets not forget, the ability of the user; but these are outside of your control.

Have a look at the website http://www.ajwilsonbooks.net/ first on the computer and then on a smart phone. (It's not perfect because I use WIX, but it's good enough until I can afford a better system.)