Our screens are getting bigger... and smaller... (is your website ready for that?)
January 07, 2010
His point being that those of us working with online marketing need to think about our content both in terms of how it will appear on giant screens now available and also on the tiny screens of mobile devices.
Naturally, I had to check the analytics for this site and, sure enough, the same two sizes Christopher identified appear in my stats... only on my site for the past month they are at #6 and #7. (Chris' were at #6 and #9):
Now, granted, when you look at the percentages of visitors using those screens, it's only 4.7% using the 1920x1200 and only 4.6% using the 320x396, but still, it's interesting to see. (I also at some point should dig in and look at the trend over time.)
Christopher mentions the need to make sure your website looks good on mobile screens and recommends the MobilePress plugin for Wordpress users.
I've not used that plugin, but what I found worked very well for the Voxeo blog site was the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code. As you can see in the image on the right, it displays all your blog posts in a very iPhone-friendly manner. It has other options, too, to interact with the blog site. (But you don't have to trust me, just head over to blogs.voxeo.com with either an iPhone, iPod Touch or Android phone and check it out.)
I admit that part of the deciding factor was that I really liked the look of the site with WPTouch. If you click on the "down arrow" in the upper right next to the blog name, you also have easy access to the tags, categories and other navigation controls of the blog.
The key point, though, is that you need to make sure that your website content degrades gracefully as it goes from giant screens to small screens. For WordPress-powered blogs, either of these plugins - or the others out there - will help reformat your content appropriately.
What are you doing on your site to address the mobile audience?
P.S. If you use Google Analytics and want to see where these screen resolutions are for your site, go into GA and then into the report for your site. Click on "Visitors", then the arrow next to "Browser Capabilities" and then finally "Screen Resolutions". Where are 1920x1200 and 320x396 on your site's list in terms of order? Feel free to leave your results (like "#6, #7") here in the comments...
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