One of the big challenges in mobile website design (actually in website design in general) is to make your site look like it was meant to be accessed via mobile devices and not just “kind of” compatible with them.
The reason why this is important is because whenever visitors enter your site from a mobile and see an unoptimized environment, they are very likely to leave…just like that. And with global mobile usage growing every year, providing a mobile friendly site lies in every affiliate’s best interest.
Here are some tips on how to make a site mobile:
Make Your Design Responsive
This is the first trick you can use to make your site mobile friendly. Although it isn’t strictly a trick because it requires some work.
First of all, a design being responsive means that it looks equally as good on any device. This is mostly done by creative CSS structure allowing various elements to be scaled or moved around the screen without losing any of their flair.
(For example, feel free to visit this guitar blog and try to resize your browser’s window to any size you want. The design will follow and adjust the viewable area to the available screen size.)
The easiest way of making your affiliate site responsive is by getting a responsive theme right from the get-go. We’re sorry, but fine tuning a non-responsive and outdated theme will usually be a lot more expensive and time-consuming.
You can find responsive WordPress themes at StudioPress, ThemeFuse, or WooThemes.
Minimize Your Branding
Having your logo displayed along with a good color scheme for the whole site is a must in today’s internet. But we’d advise you to actually minimize your branding to just these two elements.
Quite simply, there’s not much room for branding on mobile. Keep in mind that the visitor only has a small limited screen to use. So if you occupy most of it with your icons, animated headlines, social media boxes and so on, there will be very little space left for the actual content.
Speaking of content…
Focus On Content
A big portion of people who access your site through a mobile device, do it based on an impulse, a specific need. Like when doing a Google search, for example. In such a situation, they are after your content (which includes your affiliate promotions). So if your mobile design doesn’t offer a clear enough content presentation, the visitor will leave and probably never come back.
The main online publishing rule stays the same market-wide, regardless of your affiliate niche. And the rule is: Content always comes first.
Promote Offers That Make Sense For Mobile
The absolute best case scenario is when you can promote offers that the visitor can take advantage of immediately while on their mobile device.
For example, if the online gaming offer you’re promoting requires your leads to go through a registration process that can only be done on a desktop computer (maybe because of some Flash usage or any other reason) then showing this offer to mobile visitors has very little sense.
In order to fix this by finding out if a visitor is coming from a mobile device or not and then displaying a specific piece of content to this visitor, you can use a plugin like WP Mobile Detect (free).
What’s your current approach at mobile? And more importantly, have you checked if your design is mobile-friendly?