Tips

What is a Webile and Why Should You Care?

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Webile is a website that is specially formatted for mobile access. It is pretty common knowledge now that the Internet is going mobile. More and more peole are buying smartphones – in fact, the simplest of the mobiles have some kind of browsing support built in.

These phones give the power to the users to access information on the go. Now they don’t have to look for the nearest desktop or locate a cyber-cafe when they need to search for information. They can locate the desired product and service sellers from a Google search on their phones.

Where does this leave you, a website owner and marketer who is trying to get hot leads and sales? Your regular website will not be clearly visible on his tiny screen – even a large 3.5″ iPhone screen is tiny compared to the 15″ and bigger desktop screens – and he will bail out quicker than he got in.

You need a specially formatted site that displays compact information about your products, services and offers to the mobile user and gets him to call you or submit a quote request. He or she should be able to do this easily and quickly – mobile users are an impatient lot. You need a webile.

And you can order your webile here. Do it before you get distracted and lose this opportunity to tap into this vast market.

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Marketing SaaS? Offer Mobile Access To Get Major Advantage

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If you are offering Software As A Service, offering mobile access can help you open up a vast new market and get many new subscribers. Here’s how:

When you are marketing Software as a Service (SaaS), getting new subscribers and retaining the existing users for longer periods is a challenge. You can only recover your costs and make profit if you have a large subscriber base that sticks with you for several months, even years. You also need to regularly sign up new users as some of them are going to fall off anyway.

An interesting idea that you can explore is to offer access to your software from a mobile device. Since a large number of users have smartphones like iPhones, Blackberries and Android phones, and are constantly on the move, if they can access your software from their phones, their loyalty is going to increase manifold. They committed their important data to your service – now allow them access from anywhere so that they do not have to carry their heavy laptops or search around for cyber-cafes (the cyber-cafe access fees at almost all hotels is exorbitant to say the least).

Some software do things that are not conducive to access from the small screen phones. Don’t get disheartened. You can plan to at least show them a limited view of the data from their phone so that they can stay updated and tackle the critical part of their work at least.

Similarly allowing them to subscribe to alerts that are texted to them when important changes occur (called exception situations in corporatespeak) will again put them at a major advantage. If you take good care of your users, they take good care your business.

So plan and implement mobile access for some areas of your software, let them know and see your business grow. We can help – check our mobile application development services here.

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Effective Mobile Websites – How To

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Did you notice that mobile phones have become iconic devices with the proliferation of iPhones, Android phones and Blackberries? They have gathered a critical mass now and an increasing number of people are searching for information and resources on the Internet with their mobiles.

How do you tap this vast potential market? A mobile website is the answer. Get one designed as soon as possible. The competition for attention in the smartphone segment is still manageable now, but will become worse as the days pass by.

Here are 15 tips for a great mobile website:

  1. The mobile phones have much smaller screen space and therefore you need to cut down on the amount of information that you can include in the mobile pages.
  2. The phones work on much slower bandwidth even if they are on 3G. Your site loads much faster if you have smaller files, few and compact graphics and other elements.
  3. Since the capacity of the phones vary widely, use progressive enhancement. This way you will have your site working fine off the most limited browsers but show up really great with the more capable browsers and phones.
  4. Attention span on a mobile site is really limited. Include your most salient points – the big hitters –and do not try to tell everything and confuse the reader.
  5. You might try this format – powerful headline, a paragraph of introduction text and a few bullet points followed by a call to action.
  6. New page loads are taxing on the bandwidth, too much information on a single page is daunting. You have to strike a fine balance.
  7. Advertise on the mobile networks. The clicks are still affordable. You can also set up campaigns on Adwords (content display network) with mobiles as the selected target.
  8. Always send the clicks to a mobile version of the landing page. Don’t drop the ball by sending the clicks to a desktop landing page which won’t show up clearly on the small screens.
  9. Include a link to your main site so that they can see the whole story, if they are not happy with the limited information on the mobile site.
  10. Mobile commerce (pay from a mobile – Paypal and phone billing) is picking up very fast. Be ready to take advantage.
  11. Make your forms as small as possible. They can’t fill up large forms with the mobile keyboard.
  12. Hot tip: Include a touch-to-call or click-to-call button. They are working off a mobile phone after all and calling someone is the most natural thing to do.
  13. Build a SMS list. SMS marketing, like email marketing, is a potential winner. However you need to use it responsibly or else, you will go down the email spammer route.
  14. You must include a mobile sitemap and submit it to the search engines. How can we forget the search engines? They can send large number of people to your sites after all.
  15. Setup auto-sensing and auto-redirection for mobile browsers on the main URL. Don’t split your branding efforts by advertising 2 different URLs.

You can rest assured of massive success for your mobile websites and unlock a vast new market by following these tips. Please share your success report in the comments section below.

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Touch to Call Phone Numbers

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When designing your mobile web site, you must remember that mobile users do not want to fill up forms (specially if they are long). They would rather call you for getting the required information. It also helps them avoid email follow ups later.
Therefore you must put touch-to-call phone numbers on your mobile web sites. These are simple images (showing a phone icon or even your phone number) with a link to tel:phone-number.
<a href=”tel:01274 792525″>Call 01274 792525</a>
Anyone browsing your site with a smartphone can just touch this icon and a dialler screen will open up with the number pre-loaded. One just dials your number by tapping the call key.

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