The days when people exclusively surfed the web with big screens are gone. It’s not that people don’t go to websites on desktop computers any more, but mobile devices are becoming an equally popular, if not more popular method for browsing websites.
Last year, it was reported that there was more time spent on the internet by mobile devices than by desktops. Many of our clients still see more desktop traffic than mobile, but we also have clients with 70% mobile traffic.
The content of your website is important no matter what type of device people are using to visit your site. Good quality content, posted regularly, is key in ensuring that people are able to find you online. There are over 644 million active websites on the Internet, and bringing traffic to your site is getting more and more competitive every day.
What’s more, a new report from Web Designer magazine shows that 94% of mobile device users access content via their mobile devices.
So content is important, there is no question there, but can we still go about content in the same way, knowing that the way the content is being viewed is changing?
The Internet is, in a sense, a living thing. It is constantly changing. In order to remain successful online, you have to make adjustments in response to those changes. If you started your website back in 1994, and haven’t made any changes over the course of two decades, your online presence probably died along with the Yahoo Directory, if not sooner.
Web content is no different. Since more and more people are using mobile devices as their main means of browsing the Internet, you have to consider what the mobile experience is like when you are creating your content.
For example, dense 500 word paragraphs that go on and on and on are fine if your reader is sitting at home on their computer where they can read those paragraphs on a large screen. Visually, those big paragraphs aren’t hard to read and it’s easy to follow the text and find your place again if you get distracted.
However, it’s a different story on mobile devices. On a small mobile screen, those large paragraphs become thick, wordy forests that your reader has no hope of finding his or her way out of.
If the content on your site isn’t geared towards mobile users, there’s a good chance that they won’t take the time to stick around. Bounce rates will jump, and you will find it hard to accomplish your goals with your website, whatever they may be.
But a change in the approach of your content doesn’t mean that the quality of the content has to suffer. Be more concise, or consider more frequent paragraph breaks. A message doesn’t have to be drawn out for it to be good. Shakespeare wrote that brevity is the soul of wit, and he was a pretty OK writer.
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