Users accessing the internet through their smartphones, tablets and other mobile gadgets now outnumber the people using desktops and laptops to do the same. This is an event that was unimaginable a decade ago for many, but is now happening. And with the Google algorithm update “Mobilegeddon,” it “encouraged” business owners to make their online sites responsive which in other word means mobile-friendly. Even hotels are changing their hotel website design to accommodate the said update.
Here are some essential tips you can follow if you want to ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
- Responsive Web design: The best way to ensure your website is mobile friendly is to adopt a responsive web design. This design uses interactive elements available in HTML5 and CSS3 to adapt your website to various screen sizes and resolutions automatically. In fact, these elements can also detect the geographic area from which the user is accessing the website and show relevant data based on that information.
- Less is More: Minimizing the amount of text appearing on the website when being accessed through a mobile gadget is important. It makes the process of scaling to different screens easy and elegant. However, don’t forget that high quality contents are still part of your hotel marketing strategies and ensure that such will be read by your mobile visitors. Also, try and use large headers that engage the users and use only as many words as necessary.
- Less Menus, More Scrolling: Avoid including too many menus as was seen in traditional desktop design. You can instead opt for longer scrolling pages. Mobile users are habituated in scrolling to the bottom of the page so make sure all essential information is on the landing page.
- Optimize for Speed: Google recommends that websites should load under a second on mobile networks. To achieve this, data heavy elements from the website need to be pruned. Research shows that longer loading websites are much less likely to have user recall than their faster loading competitors.
A simple way to test if your hotel website design is optimized correctly for mobile interfaces is to run it through Google’s mobile friendly test page. You just need to enter the URL of your website and it will do the rest.
Hotel internet marketing is shifting its prime focus to mobile users as the entire process from booking to payments gets integrated with their mobile devices. It is imperative that hotels be ready to follow hotel website design trends or risk being left behind and getting few to zero online bookings.
