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Welcome to this edition of Cliffs Notes Tuesday. I'm Eric Rattner, client solutions specialist.
We're talking about content strategy for mobile. I'm sure you're pretty excited to hear about
Chapter Four, which is strategy and planning. Really, we're going to walk through all the
steps that you should go through when you're starting to think about a mobile website.
We're going to start with the baby steps. This is when you're at that first stage, and
you're like, "Oh. Hey. I need a mobile website, but I don't really know what that means."
Let's take a look and kind of figure out what your first really small step should be.
First, you should take a look at analytics. That's probably one of the most important
things to do because people are coming to your site from a mobile browser. Figuring
out how many, what browsers, what devices they're using, that's important to do. Taking
a look at user research, seeing how people are actually navigating your site, what pages
they're viewing from their mobile browser, what's most important for them. Then, going
into competitive review, taking a look at what your competitors' mobile websites look
like. Those are probably the first steps that I would take when starting to think about
a mobile website.
Obviously, once you have those down, you realize that you really do need a mobile website.
It's really important. The next thing you're going to want to do is obviously convince
your CEO or your higher ups about how are we going to get this done, and why we should
have this. Obviously, taking a look and starting with the data. Taking a look at all those
numbers of: these are how many people are visiting our site from a mobile browser, this
is the pages that they're viewing, all of those baby steps you took, bringing them in,
taking a look at the data, and convincing them through that data. Does the CEO react
well to data? That's something important to think about. Another element that you might
be able to convince your CEO with is just the growth of mobile over the years. It's
obviously turned into... People are using their mobile browsers more and more, as well
as tablets. That's another element here. So, showing the growth in the industry may also
convince your CEO to move forward with a mobile or tablet ready website.
Shaming your CEO. I don't know if this is a really good strategy, but it might work.
Showing him possibly your competition and how they're using their mobile browsers, or
mobile websites rather, and how that's performing potentially for them. That's a good way to
look at it. Then of course, there's usability. What the book actually suggests is telling
your CEO or your higher ups to get rid of their computers for a day and to just use
a mobile phone to navigate the web. Obviously, they're going to be on your website a lot,
the company's website a lot, and they're going to probably have a very hard time navigating
it if they don't have a mobile website. So, that's where you should start in convincing
your CEO and the higher ups to really get a mobile website.
The next step here is just... Once you convince your CEO that this is a good idea, and the
CEO says, "Alright. We don't want to go all in. We want to take some short steps and look
at the short-term solution, because obviously, something needs to be done as soon as possible."
The first thing that the book suggests is really serving up a subset of content. Get
up a mobile landing page as soon as possible. The book actually says that you should stay
away from any type of having your whole website say, "Coming soon." A mobile landing page
that has information on it that obviously is important to your site is great, even if
you just do the bare minimum. Have just content and just text on a site that works for mobile
is a great thing to do. This kind of looks like those... It might look like some of those
outdated pages you see that are still up from 1995.
The book suggests that you do not move forward with animated GIFs on these. That's actually
a direct quote from the book. So, definitely take that advice. Another idea is to fork
your content. This basically means having some pages go to mobile landing pages, and
starting on a smaller scale. That might be a good way to go. Another thing you could
do is have a responsive design for a non-desktop. So, your mobile tablet will be completely
responsive, but you'll also have another version of the site which is served just to desktop.
This, again, is a short-term approach because down the road, you're going to want to have
a completely responsive site.
The last thing you can do, and this is probably the last case scenario, is send a desktop
while you're actually putting forth plans and putting something in motion for a full
mobile experience. That's what the book suggests in the short-term. Again, these are ideas
that should not be done for more than a couple months. The next step in the book here is
kind of looking at the desired state and what should be your end game. Your end game should
have content available for everybody, no matter what browser or what mobile browser you're
using or what tablet. It should all be the same at the end of the day. Again, this should
be attached to a CMS so that people can easily update this content, easily make changes.
You should constantly be analyzing your data, constantly be seeing trends, making changes
based on the data that you have, and improving all of that content. It's definitely important.
Lastly, you should have internal processes set up in order to update this content. We're
specifically speaking about mobile here, obviously. Just because it's on mobile doesn't mean it
should be static and never changed. You update your desktop content. Mobile content should
be changed as well. Hopefully, you have a responsive design as well so that you don't
even have to think about it, and you can update all in one place. That's really the best steps
for your strategy and planning to get a mobile site ready. Thanks for joining us today on
Cliffs Notes Tuesday. [music].