Make Your B2B WordPress Website and Content Mobile Friendly
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. 
)
About the author: Dianna Huff
A B2B web marketing expert, Dianna helps B2B companies grow through SEO, marketing writing, and social media. A frequent speaker, Dianna has been quoted in numerous blogs, books, and articles; her client list includes large and small B2B companies across the U.S. Follow her on Twitter @diannahuff. To receive her e-course on creating great B2B marketing content, subscribe to her newsletter, The MarCom Strategist.
July 7th, 2011 at 2:40 pm
Good Morning Dianna!
Wow, 28.6% clicked over to the mobile version, that is pretty impressive.
What I love about your case is just how easy this can be. You didn’t hire a developer (although Geek Sons might help) or build an app. With WordPress, you were able to quickly make your site mobile friendly and then use it as your platform to easily make your email more mobile friendly as well.
Of course, to complete the cycle, I am reading this and commenting from my mobile. The site looks great, and if you can read this, then the commenting is seamless as well!
– @wittlake
July 7th, 2011 at 2:47 pm
Eric — Thanks for the reply. Yes, it was easy. Just took some brain power to connect the dots.
July 7th, 2011 at 4:05 pm
Excellent food for thought and I will be looking at this! Thanks, Diana!
July 7th, 2011 at 4:19 pm
Thanks, Jeanne — for the comment and for stopping by!
July 10th, 2011 at 4:46 am
This has been on my to-do list for a while, but kept getting pushed back.
However, tonight I put together my young son’s first blog and figured I’d let his site be the test-case before unleashing a plug-in like this on my own.
The plug-in worked like a charm in my test just now on my iPhone.
So thanks for the prompt and the recommendation. I’ll roll this out to my business site next week.
By the way, I’m one iPhone version behind you with my 3G. Whatever the next version is that comes out this year, I’m buyin’ it!
July 10th, 2011 at 7:05 pm
Mike, Glad it worked out for you. According to Geek Son, who knows everything about Apple, early fall is the date for the next iPhone / iPod / iPad update. He told me to wait until then to get a new phone AND a new iPad.
July 12th, 2011 at 5:28 am
Have you all checked out Google’s Mobile sites experiment? I’m working through it here tomorrow morning and I’ll blog about it in the afternoon. The announcement is here: http://www.google.com/sites/help/intl/en/mobile-landing-pages/mlpb.html
I do have a WordPress site, so I will weigh whether I need the WPTouch Plug in or not. Any thoughts? Thanks! Suzanne
July 12th, 2011 at 8:22 am
Suzanne, No I haven’t checked it out. Thanks for letting me know about it.