This document provides 7 tips for creating user-friendly mobile content. It notes that mobile usage is growing rapidly and surpassing desktop usage. It emphasizes making content easy to view on small screens by reducing images, breaking up long blocks of text, using plug-ins to optimize for mobile, and ensuring video content is mobile-friendly. The tips advise content creators to focus on succinct, digestible content tailored for easy consumption on mobile devices.

1. 7 Tips for Creating User-
friendly Mobile Content
by Jessica Davis, Godot Media

2. FACT #1
By 2014, people will connect
to the Internet more from
their mobile devices than their
desktop devices.

3. FACT #2
2013 is the year for mobile
marketing as businesses are
in a rush to create and publish
mobile-friendly content.

4. FACT #3
Latest estimates show that
there are 4 mobile devices for
every laptop or computer.

5. FACT #4
People always carry their
mobile devices with them
wherever they are unlike
laptops or desktops.

6. FACT #5
The mobile trend has given
rise to information snacking
where people are consuming
content via their mobile.

7. FACT #6
Mobile users are known to
abandon their attempts to visit
any website if it takes more
than a few seconds to load.

8. FACT #7
Mobile users often do not
return to websites that gave
them a buggy user experience
the first time.

9. T h e r e f o r e . . .

10. Companies and publishers must start creating mobile-
friendly content to be published on mobile-friendly
websites so that they do not lose out on a large
customer base.
Content that is compatible with desktop devices
does not cut it anymore as people cannot view it or
engage with it from their mobile devices. Creating
responsive or mobile-friendly websites is essential and
they must be filled with content that is mobile-friendly
too.

11. Creating great
mobile content is not
rocket science.
Here are 7 tips that will help you create such content.

12. Reduce the number of images
Content marketers know that visual content is the most appealing. However,
adding large images and replacing textual content with pictures is great on
websites meant to be viewed only from desktop devices and not if you want to
build great mobile content.
Infographics, images, graphs, etc. are extremely large files that take a long time
to load on mobile devices as these devices have limited bandwidths.
Also, large images mean that the person viewing your website has to scroll a lot
to view the images in their entirety. A website with many large images is hard to
view and navigate via small mobile devices and can frustrate mobile users.
TIP #1

13. Reduce size of images
Content marketers know that visual content is the most appealing. However,
adding large images and replacing textual content with pictures is great on
websites meant to be viewed only from desktop devices and not if you want to
build great mobile content.
Infographics, images, graphs, etc. are extremely large files that take a long time
to load on mobile devices as these devices have limited bandwidths.
Also, large images mean that the person viewing your website has to scroll a lot
to view the images in their entirety. A website with many large images is hard to
view and navigate via small mobile devices and can frustrate mobile users.
TIP #2

14. Eliminate flash components
Flash animation, video and navigation content are absolutely incompatible with
mobile devices. Adobe Flash is used to create rich media content and they
work fine on desktop devices but on mobile devices they can ruin the user’s
experience with the online content.
Another reason to stop creating and publishing flash-based content is the fact
that Apple has stopped flash compatibility on all its mobile devices and Google
has also followed suit by removing Flash from its Android operating system.
Use HTML 5 to create rich media content that is extremely mobile friendly.
TIP #3

15. Keep textual content short and simple
Mobile devices offer only a few square inches in area to view content. This
makes it very hard for mobile users to view long textual content and most users
lose patience when they have to navigate and scroll too many times to view
content on any website.
To create excellent mobile content, make sure that the content is succinct
and short so that mobile users do not have to scroll too much to get all the
information. Highlight important points and make sure that the font is big
enough so that users can read the content without having to zoom in.
TIP #4

16. Break up textual content
Readers looking for online content have no patience to go through long textual
content and this is even harder to do on mobile screens.
Make sure to break up your content into small, easy-to-digest paragraphs and
do not tackle too many points in one paragraph.
Use bullet points, numbered lists, informative subheads and highlighted text to
get the most important points across to mobile users reading your content from
mobile devices. Also, using these bullet points and numbered lists also reduces
the amount of text needed to describe something and less text always increases
the mobile-friendliness of the content.
Hire a good copywriter to create short, punchy mobile content.
TIP #5

17. Include mobile plug-ins
There are many plug-ins on the Internet that allow people to create mobile-
friendly content by allowing users to engage more easily with content from
their mobile devices.
One of the most widely used plug-ins is WPTouch that is perfect for creating
mobile content that needs to be published on WordPress. It makes content
more mobile-friendly by removing large design components and allows the
content creator to customize the content for mobile visitors. Although content
customized via WPTouch may not be very visually appealing, it is compatible
with all mobile platforms.
TIP #6

18. Make video content more mobile-friendly
Video content is one of the most popular forms of content that is being
published as it allows companies to create more personal relationships with
customers and readers. However as mentioned before, Flash is a complete no-
no for creating mobile content.
Mobile video content consumption has risen exponentially so you should
ensure that all your videos can be viewed easily on small mobile screens. With
Custom CSS and HTML 5, videos can be made to resize automatically to fit any
mobile device screen.
TIP #7

19. Brought to you by
Tin Dizdarevic, Publisher Development Director, Zemanta
E: tin@zemanta.com, T: 646.207.4636
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