The greatest inventions in history have evolved from a need. They’ve usually solved a problem that plagued a lot of people. Apple’s iPhone does just that; it solves a problem that plagues smartphone users worldwide – poor usability.
Ten years ago, most small business owners didn’t have a website and probably didn’t see the need for one. Now, a business without a website is considered second rate at best. A website is a necessity for doing business in the 21st century – but how does your website appear on the screens of today’s most popular mobile devices? If you haven’t considered that point, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity.
How does your page look when viewed on an iPod touch? Is it easy to navigate? The most important information should be readily available to your visitors, who may be standing in line or walking down the street, browsing your content on a screen smaller than a pack of playing cards. Is your website ready to be viewed from an iPhone? If not, this book will show you how.
There are over 50 Million iPhones in the pockets of affluent and web savvy individuals all over the planet. If you have a product or service to sell, this market is literally open… Once you know how to reach them.
It’s a different world
The mobile web brings with it a new set of concerns, ranging from usability to interactivity. Every button and intended interaction may need to be reconsidered with your end-user’s new platform in mind. It’s one thing to present a website for a desktop user, but when you translate that experience onto the mobile platform, it can be a less than pleasant experience.
Let me give you an example.
Consider for a moment, the popular UI configuration of many websites, which have a logo in the upper left corner and a navigation bar underneath that runs across the top horizontally. The first 2 buttons will often not be clickable to a visitor using an iPhone! Why? The height of the menu link, when shrunken down to display on the reduced screen, will be reduced to just a fraction of an inch. The click, or “tap” as it’s referred to on touch screen devices, will often register to the logo instead! What’s even worse is, this link is going to refresh the same page they are on.
This may very well leave your customer frustrated at the experience of the page “incorrectly” reloading when they think they are visiting a given page. You don’t need metrics to tell you you’ve lost the sale. From a interaction standpoint, they would have needed to pinch-zoom to the upper left hand of your website to get to a point where they could click. But effectively, your site countered any potential interest with immediate frustration caused by poor mobile usability; your website’s unintentional reaction to a mobile visitor lost you this sale, before you even had a chance to pitch them.
Now imagine for a moment, that you had presented a series of icons that showed the customer your menu options in a format they could easily identify and tap. Imagine that this could be done automatically for your user, without the need to create an entirely separate version of your site for mobile visitors. Well you can, and it’s relatively simple once you know how.
In the above scenario, you would use CSS to reformat your content for iPhone. Used in combination with a detection code, it can be a very powerful tool. Think about it, a user comes to your site from an iPhone, your website knows this and restructures your content for their device – automatically!
You can also interact with the native apps on the iPhone. Click-to-call, for example, is where your phone number is a live hyperlink, and when the user presses it your phone number is dialed on their phone. They don’t need to write your number down and call at a later time; they are instantly in touch with you. Another possibility is to present a link on your website interacts with the maps application, where they can use geolocation to plot a course to your location.
With a few taps of the finger your location is passed from your website to the iPhone’s native Google maps application, automatically! That’s the power of an iPhone Microsite, and I’ll cover these topics in detail in another article.
Visit http://site.imicrosites.com and get your iPhone website for free.
