Is your site mobile friendly?

 In opinion

Following on from my earlier post mobile advertising – walking the talk, I thought I’d check out how “mobile ready” a number of well known blogs and sites are that talk about mobile advertising.

Luckily, many are already mobile friendly, in that viewing them from a mobile handset presents the mobile version or optimised sites. Andy Moore left a comment on the walking the talk article which read

“….if you’re talking the talk you need to be able to walk the walk too.

I’ve been preparing an article for my site which goes through a large number of the blogs of so called mobile evangelists.

Surely I’m not alone in seeing the irony that some (read most) of these folks don’t have mobile versions of their sites?”

I am using Andy’s excellent wordpress mobile plug-in to ensure that this blog delivers a mobile friendly version for mobile users, and I’ve just updated all of the landing pages for my personal site at www.andrewgrill.com using Andy’s PHP code to detect a mobile browser, and deliver them to andrewgrill.mobi which is my mobile optimised site.

I’m glad I underwent the process to be mobile friendly, not just because you need to walk the talk, but I know that many of my peers spend a great deal of their day on their mobile, and constantly getting “big screen” versions of popular sites becomes tiresome.

For some time now I have been using Opera Mobile on my E61i (currently only able to use v8.65 as the 9.5 version is not ready for Symbian yet), but the great thing about this browser is the abilty to show pages in stripped down mode – ie no graphics, just text.  Not only does this reduce the data costs, but it means i just get the facts while mobile (and in a hurry) and not all the flashy graphics.

More and more people are demanding information on the move, and recent operator announcements from operators such as Vodafone in the UK who are now offering 500MB of data per month included with any plan (not yet for small business 300 customers – come on guys…) means that more prople will be wanting to grab information on the move.

So if you have a website of any sort, take the time to ensure that it is mobile friendly – especially if your content deals with mobile advertising! You can also make some money from these sites by using companies such as Admob who provide the ability to display mobile advertising on mobile friendly pages.

About 

Based in London, The Actionable Futurist and former Global Managing Partner at IBM, Andrew Grill is a popular and sought-after presenter and comementator on issues around digital disruption, workplace of the future and new technologies such as blockchain. Andrew is a multiple TEDx and International Keynote Speaker.