Developed specifically for small and mid-sized business owners and marketers in the MA – NH Merrimack Valley!

If you’re a small or mid-sized business owner or marketer who is completely overwhelmed by the Web, Facebook, search engine optimization or anything else Web related, I’ve developed a new series of low-cost Web marketing seminars just for you.

In the first of six sessions, Jim Somers of Sonora DesignWorks (Newburyport, MA), will cover the top Web design and hosting mistakes he sees small and mid-sized companies making.

Jim will give tips on how to avoid expensive design mistakes as well as share his expertise on some of the “red flags” business owners and marketers should be aware of when choosing Web design and hosting companies.

You’ll learn how to use the Web to market and grow your business and will walk away with practical, hype-free information that you can put to use immediately.

Bring your lunch, something to take notes with, and business cards for networking.

For the full list of seminars and dates, visit my Web Marketing Seminars page.

SEMINAR DETAILS
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
12:30 – 1:30 PM
Atkinson Community Center
4 Main Street (Rte. 121)
Atkinson, NH

Cost: $35 per person payable in advance or at the door

RSVP
Dianna Huff
DH Communications, Inc.
603-382-8093
email: seminars@dhcommunications.com

I hope to see you on Wednesday!

For months now I’ve been watching how I and others use mobile devices. I see iPads everywhere I go: one mom I know, for example, answers her email and reads online magazines while at our kids’ fencing lessons. One of my clients is now using hers for mobile banking. I even heard one story of a symphony conductor who put his sheet music on his iPad!

And, as I’ve posted before, I use my iPhone for everything but a phone.

When I read Christina “CK” Kerley’s report about the Mobile Revolution and B2B, and then heard Pauline Jakober of Group Twenty Seven say that she’s now targeting PPC campaigns for mobile, everything “clicked.” (It was one of those “goosebumps” kind of moments when you know you’ve hit a good story.)

Despite the proliferation of mobile, too often content is very un-mobile friendly. A site either doesn’t lend itself to the small screen and the content is very hard to read, the clueless company is still using Flash (rolling my eyes), or I can’t “expand” the page in order to view the copy in a larger font.

For these reasons and more, I installed the nifty WPTouch Plugin for WordPress. This plugin makes your WordPress site and/or blog mobile friendly. I love it!

This is what my home page looks like on the iPhone using the plugin. (The plugin allows users to turn the mobile theme off — you just scroll down to the bottom of the page to see the option.)

But after hearing Pauline talk about mobile, I realized I needed to go one step further: I added a “mobile friendly version” link to my e-newsletter which went out July 1. I placed it at the top of the newsletter so that those people reading it on a smart phone would see it first thing. Here’s how it looked on the iPhone:

If you click the link, you get this nice mobile-friendly version:

When I checked my e-newsletter stats, I was pleasantly surprised to see that of the people who opened my e-newsletter, 28.6% clicked through to the mobile-friendly version. This made me go “hmmmmmm.”

What are the key take-aways?

You must seriously consider how your content looks on mobile devices — My bank, for example, doesn’t have a mobile friendly site, and when I lost my debit card, I had to wait over an hour until I was back at home as I couldn’t access their site or phone numbers from my phone. Grrrrrrrr.

Building your site in Flash is totally stupid and a complete waste of money — I had a small business call with the typical, “I’m not getting any leads from my site” complaint. Well, duh. One of your problems is that it’s in Flash. You can’t view it on Apple mobile devices nor can you optimize it.

Tablet use is soaring — You can track which mobile devices people are using via Google Analytics. Click the “Visitors” report, then Mobile, then Mobile Devices. For my site, iPad use outstrips smart phone use. That makes me go “hmmmmmmm,” too.

What’s your experience with mobile-friendly — or not so mobile-friendly — content? What are you doing to ensure people can access and read your content?

(iPhone images courtesy of my Geek Son. He has the iPhone 4 while I’m still stuck with the lowly 3GS. )