How To Make Your Website Work Across Multiple Devices

How To Make Your Website Work Across Multiple Devices In today’s podcast we will find what it means to be multi-screen or what some call mobile friendly and what this actually means for different businesses. Hello, I’m Carlos Quintero and I own a digital media branding company called MediaOnQ. It is important that you build a website that showcases your business on every screen from smartphones and tablets to computers and even web enabled television sets and here’s why.  When an individual is looking for your service, product or information they can either find you or they will find your competitor. You must remember that your customers expect a great browsing experience regardless of what device they are using. I’d like you to think about this for a moment. Can you recall a time or times when you may have started reading an email on your phone while at a red light during your commute or while waiting for your coffee at the drive thru and then continued reading on your laptop at home or on your computer when you got to your office? Or maybe you heard a commercial on the radio for a new car, and then used your tablet to check it out? If these things sound familiar, that’s because they’re all part of the new norm in multi-screen content consumption. In a recent Google Study called the Multi-screen World, they discovered that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a single goal. And again, we are talking about everything from a smartphone to a smart TVs. So what does this actually mean? Well from my perspective it simply means that businesses need to adapt their web presence for smaller screens and I mean screens that are less than 7 inches diagonally. It is true that normal websites when viewed on tablet devices generally render well enough to allow users to navigate them.  This however is not true when we shrink the screen size to that of a smartphone. Here are a couple of questions for you to consider. Are your customers able to interact with your content properly on all devices? Is your company’s you web experience really optimized? Are you currently offering customers exactly what they’re looking for based on how they consume your content? In the next segment we are going to take the business perspective to help us understand how today’s customers interact with our site. Recently, I posted a picture of my wife using her iPad while we sat down to watch a television show together after dinner.  At the time, she didn’t know that she’d actually inspired this episode of Digital Media Branding. Studies show that people are basically plugged in all day long and often times while simultaneously watching TV. This is where the light bulb should really come on. Businesses that allow users to interact with their brand across all platforms and on all devices are going to naturally generate more engagement. At MediaOnQ we call that having an Active Brand. Active Brands place your message where the customers are. More engagement generally means higher brand recognition and more revenue. So how do we get started? We first need to clearly understand how today’s customers interact with your website. We can do this by taking a look at the site’s analytics. And in case anyone out there doesn’t know, Google provides terrific analytics tools that are completely free of charge. If you need help with that please visit MediaOnQ.com and send me an email, I’d be more than happy to help. The analytics can help us understand where customers come from, when are they visiting the site, what types of content they are consuming and what devices they are using to access the site. Taking the time to analyze these stats is important because they will provide the areas of interest or more specifically where it is that you should be spending your time. Now that you’ve gone over your site’s analytics you should have more of a clear picture as to what a smart phone user is looking for on your website. You should also compare what say, a Tablet or Computer user is accessing on your website. You may notice that each device may target different content on your site. This is all valuable information because it will allow you to build a mobile site or more specifically a smartphone site or tablet site that focuses on the content and information that users want or expect when they access your site from their device. What we are doing here specifically is tailoring the focus of your mobile site to specific audiences, rather than simply putting up a stripped down version of your standard website. It is always important to keep the user in mind when designing the device-specific experience around your brand’s content, products or information.  Successful websites always optimize the content to improve the engagement. This has never been more important than in the mobile web experience. Staying on top of what your customers want and expect will help you provide a better experience for them as well as help set you apart from your competitors. Loyal customers are often the best referral source. If you found this information useful please subscribe to the Digital Media Branding Podcast on iTunes and share it with a friend. Join me next time where we’ll discuss the variety of options you can take to make your websites adapt to the multi-screen web experience. I’m Carlos Quintero owner and founder of MediaOnQ Thank you for listening.