Mobile web usage is growing. Are you ready?

For many small businesses, creating a website that functions decently on mobile browsers is the last thing on their mind.

And it’s easy for people to tell themselves it doesn’t matter. After all, isn’t mobile web traffic just 1% of all web traffic?

I can definitely understand this perspective. Particularly when you think about how hard it can be to solve the mobile website problem. I’ve often noticed that when you don’t see a viable solution to a problem, it’s really hard to keep that problem top of mind.

But mobile web traffic is not going away. In fact, it’s growing steadily. For details, check out the article, Mobile Web traffic grows, not slows, during summer, on Mobile Marketer Daily.

Here are a few highlights:

• According to Nielsen, “the number of consumers accessing the mobile Internet in the United States has jumped from 54 million in May 2009 to 72 million in May 2010, a year-over-year increase of 34 percent.”
• The mobile analytics firm Ground Truth has found that mobile users are on the web for an average of 3 hours a month and view an average of 1,000 pages a month.

Traditional web traffic dips in the summer as people are outside playing instead of stuck at home in front of their computers.

But web traffic through handhelds is not dropping. And if you think about it, it makes sense. When we’re out and about, our phones are right there with us. I recently drove to California and back with my family, and we used the mobile web constantly throughout the trip, whether to get maps, find interesting places to eat, or find things to do. In contrast, I opened my laptop only a couple of times.

So what’s a small business owner to do?

Well, you can invest the time and money to create a website that works on mobile phones (but check first — your existing site may be perfectly decent). But while you’re pondering that (and putting it off), there are plenty of other actions you can take.

For example, make sure to update your listing on Google Local and on Yelp. Find out how people are searching for businesses on their phones and make sure you’re part of the results. (Don’t have a phone? Don’t know what apps people are using? Ask them!)

Where are the good coffee shops?

Don’t think this effort will matter? Check out this search I just did on Yelp’s iPhone app for coffee shops near me. Where is Enzo’s? Straight Shots? Teezers? KT Chocolates? Those are 4 excellent and distinctly different places to get a cup of coffee within half a mile of my location, but none of them show up. It would take less than 20 minutes for any of those businesses to get listed on Yelp, and that could result in hundreds of dollars of additional income over the summer tourist season.

(The only listing that’s there is a misplaced pin for a fine dining establishment.)

Photo credit: iphonepics via Flickr creative commons

We all want more traffic to our websites, right?

The answer to getting more high-quality visitors might be right under your nose.

If you’ve got Google Analytics installed on your site and have at least a little bit of traffic to analyze, download this short report (just 8 pages — with pictures!) and you’ll be on your way to finding new sources for good traffic to your site.

http://websitemomentum.com/files/analyticsreport-excerpt-1.2.pdf

There’s no opt-in for this report. Just download it and start making use of it.

If it’s helpful (which I think it will be), come on back and get onto my newsletter list so you can be sure to get the advance discount as soon as the full version (10 times as long, 10 times the business-buiilding goodness) is ready to go.

(As a bonus, you’ll get a free report on how to set up sharing buttons on your website, including cut and paste code for you to use.)

Photo by RobeRt Vega

This morning I heard about Kurrently, a new search engine for Facebook and Twitter. I ran a couple of searches for various keywords and immediately uncovered some interesting conversations. Definitely a helpful tool for visibility into the conversations happening in Facebook.

Here’s the post from Jay Baer with all the details.

This morning a student in my web basics class asked about Search Engine Optimization, wondering if I could point her toward a quick guide to SEO.

Luckily, I could.

Brian Clark of CopyBlogger has written a ~30 page guide to the basics of optimizing your site and content for Google and other search engines. He lays it all out in a very readable form. I found several things I’m not doing, even though I should know better.

The report covers the basics of how search engines crawl and index web pages, as well as the key techniques for getting links and optimizing your content.

I like Brian’s focus on providing what your real human visitors want, while also adding a bit of magic for the search engines. This is completely “white hat” stuff, not complicated trickery that will be out of date next year.

The report is completely free. You don’t even have to provide an email address to get it.

Download the report.

Last night my daughter and I had a conversation about the cost of college.

She’s 9.

I didn’t mean for it to happen. But she was asking for math problems, so I said to her, “Here’s a math problem I just did yesterday: What’s the difference between 55,492 and 21,177?”

Naturally she wanted to know WHY I had done that particular problem. I told her it was because I was comparing what my college cost now to what it cost 20 years ago. After we solved the problem, we guesstimated what the tuition would be in another 10 years.

She turned to me. “Dad, I really want to go to that college, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to afford it.” Then she thought a little more and said, “I’ll put all the money from my allowance into college savings. I don’t need spending money.”

Well, then we did a little figuring on how fast money grows if you put it in the bank. (Not so fast.)

And I told her that one way to make her small savings grow much faster would be to invest the money in starting a little business. We ran a few numbers on a hypothetical window washing business, and she was intrigued.

Naturally, later last night I came across this video on a friend’s blog:

The video is 20 minutes long, but it’s worth watching. First off, it’s part of TEDtalks, which if you’re not familiar with it already is a fantastic series of short lectures available as free videos. Second, he’s got some great points about how we can work with our children to give them the entrepreneurial bug.

There were a couple of moments in the piece where I did start to lose interest. For a few minutes it seems like he’s just making a list of all the entrepreneurial things he did as a kid. But even these are pretty inspiring.

What really got my attention were some of his comments about allowance. He thinks a regular allowance is something that trains children to wait for a paycheck. Instead, he advocates training your children to keep their eyes open for things that need to be done, then coming to you and negotiating a fee for doing them.

Honestly, I loved this idea. I am by and large against the idea of paying kids to do chores (and my thinking was confirmed by some comments in Daniel Pink’s recent book, Drive), but this changes the game completely.

Instead of using payment as a compliance tool (“I know you want money so I’m going to give you money to make you help me around the house.”) you give the kids the central role in the transaction, solving our problems in exchange for money. (Note that he didn’t seem like the kind of person who would ever pay a kid to clean their own room. There are many things we do just because that’s part of being alive, and we don’t get paid for them.)

I also liked the focus on negotiation. My kids negotiate with me all the time, but it’s for more dessert or a later bedtime. I’d like to see them negotiate a fair payment for a task I would be willing to outsource.

Take a look at the video and share your thoughts in the comments!

Here’s the blog post where I found the video: SuperWAHM. Mel is smart and worth following.

[A live, in-person class on Orcas Island]

If you’re like most people, working on your website is intimidating. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Anyone can learn to maintain their own website.

It doesn’t matter whether your website is hand-coded, built in Dreamweaver, iWeb, Macwebsitebuilder, WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or some other system you can’t pronounce. There are always going to be little changes you need to make, and these all become MUCH easier when you know a few foundational skills.

Let’s compare maintaining your website to maintaining your house. You might not want to know how to move walls around, or even how to fix your oven. But you should be able to…

Hang pictures and curtains (image uploading, formatting options)

Paint the walls (change colors)

Rearrange the furniture (adjust padding, margins, typefaces, etc)

Wash the dishes (keep things up to date)

You don’t need to know structural engineering, home building, etc. You don’t need to …

And unless you want to get into designing sites yourself, what you really need to know is a subset of HTML and CSS. A few powerful techniques can get you out of a lot of sticky situations, and you can leave the rest to the experts.

In this course we’ll take a practical hands-on approach, building from the true basics. Everything will be based on real tasks (on fake websites), so you’ll learn by doing.

We’ll cover topics like changing text, adding formatting, changing pictures, uploading files, adding forms (like e-newsletter signup forms), etc. And we’ll dive into certain advanced areas, such as using padding and margins to make things line up the way you want them (because this can often be the difference between an attractive website and one that’s distracting and hard to read).

We’ll also talk a lot about the mistakes you can make, and how to turn them into part of your learning process instead of letting them terrify you.

By the end you’ll have a good idea of what you can fix and what you shouldn’t touch. Just like knowing the difference between moving a vase on your kitchen counter and moving the kitchen counter. Or between moving your toaster oven and moving your real oven.

The class meets for six weeks on Wednesdays, April 14 to May 19, from 9am to 10am at the Funhouse. It’s $100, or just $75 if you’re a Funhouse member. To sign up email krista@thefunhouse.org or go to http://www.thefunhouse.org/current-classes and click on “register in advance” to fill out the registration form.

A laptop is helpful but not required.

Call me at 298-2869 if you have questions.

Excluding categories from the homepage (or anywhere else, presumably). From the DIY themes forums:

http://diythemes.com/forums/php-programming/24675-exclude-category.html

Also potential cross-reference help:

http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/wordpress/category-hacks/

Great resource to help you get started with Twitter. Requires a signup to Dave’s newsletter list, but that’s no big deal because he’s got good information. While you’re in the signup mood, be sure to sign up for my newsletter list, too.

Detailed article on using search operators in Google to find people’s Twitter accounts and follow tweets by geographical area. (Searches in Google and in Twitter). John Jantsch.

Sorry, folks. You can’t ignore it any longer.

The mobile internet is here. People are using their mobile phones to visit sites on the internet. Mobile browsers are hitting the mainstream.

How many people are browsing with mobile browsers?

Take your head out of the sand

Try 50 Million of them. And the number is growing every month.

Which means that people are definitely visiting your site from their mobile phones, with mobile browsers.

Here’s the question you need to ask yourself:

What does a person using a mobile browser they see when they call up your website?

(Hint: It’s probably not good.)

Now, I could show you pictures all day about how mediocre other people’s sites are when viewed on mobile browsers, but the only site you really care about is your own. That’s natural.

So let’s find out what your site looks like.

First, though, you’ll need to understand that this exercise is not going to give you a 100% accurate result. With so many different phones running so many different operating systems and mobile browsers, the best you can hope for is an approximation.

But an approximation can be useful. For example, which of these two versions of Wikipedia would hold your interest?

Wikipedia for desktop

Wikipedia for mobile browser

The first image is what most websites look like on mobile. You can use the site, but not well.

The second image shows a mobile optimized site. You can read the text! Which would you rather have?

Here’s how to check out your own site:

Visit http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/ (but don’t click just yet; there are a few things I want to explain)

This site shows you a virtual cell phone running the Opera Mini mobile browser. This mobile browser isn’t on every smartphone, but it’s pretty representative. If your site looks great on Opera Mini, it’ll probably look great on other mobile browsers. If it doesn’t, it probably won’t.

The best thing about this demo site is that you don’t have to download anything. If you do an Internet search you’ll find many different mobile browser emulators available, but most of them require a download. Many are geared toward professional developers, and require not only that you download software, but also that you know how to extract, configure, and run things from the command line. Not worth the trouble!

Here’s how to use the Opera site:

1. Call up the site. If the site doesn’t display a virtual cell phone screen, try a different browser. (Firefox works.)

2. Click the “accept” button. (This step took me a while to figure out. Probably I should have read the instructions!)

3. Enter your URL in the mobile browser:

Enter your URL

4. Look at the results.

5. Cringe.

6. Whimper. (Optional)

If your site looks like this one, that’s totally typical:

Typical results for mobile browsers

The good news is, we can fix this.

As I warned above, this image of your site is not 100% accurate, but it will give you a good idea.

Let’s contrast this with a site that has been (minimally) designed for mobile. This is just a test site, FYI, not a real live version.

Test site designed for mobile

Notice any difference?

Other emulators:

If you’re running on Mac, there’s a decent application that’s worth downloading to see how your site looks on an iPhone. It’s called iPhoney, and you can get it at http://sourceforge.net/projects/iphonesimulator/. It’s interesting, but not perfect.

On Windows, you can download any number of simulators from Microsoft and manufacturers like Nokia.

But you shouldn’t waste your time. The simulator above gives you a good enough idea of what people see.

Next steps:

If you’re running WordPress, there are several plugins to “mobilize” your site. Take a look at http://ielectrify.com/design/wordpress-mobile/ for a rundown on the different options.

I have quite a bit more to say about mobile-friendly websites for small businesses. If you want to be sure to stay in the loop, sign up for my newsletter right here.

(If you’re like me you’re fully confident right now that you’ll remember to check back for the next installment in a few days, but you’re a busy person and it’s probably going to slip your mind. So do yourself a favor and sign up. It’s painless and there’ll be tons of value over the long term. Plus you get my free report on fixing up your website.)

You can also:

1. Tell your friends about this post.
2. Share it on social networks (tweet button works great, so does Facebook share, and more buttons are below)
3. Ask questions in the comments.

(Photo credit for head in sand man: jvh33 via Flikr)