I bought my first internet enabled smartphone (or mobile device, if you prefer) two days ago. The first thing I did was look up this and my other website to see how they looked. I was pleased enough with how this site looked, but was horrified when I saw that my Sihanoukville Journal came up as an unreadable website. You see, I recently signed up with Dudamobile and created a mobile site for Writing Resources. I thought I’d made one for my Journal, but forgot an important step that took about 10 seconds to correct.
In a panic (sort of), I jumped on to WordPress, downloaded the Dudamobile plug-in and followed the directions. Next time I looked, my Journal was a nice readable list of blog titles.
Why is this important? Well, statistics show that more people are buying smartphones than are buying PCs. They’re reading and buying online. When people travel, they don’t take their PCs with them: they take their smartphones. If somebody who is on my mailing list is in Phnom Penh and wants to book a room in a Sihanoukville hotel, they may go to an internet café, but they also may browse on their mobile device.
Statistics and speculation aside, the 2 graphs below illustrate the difference between having a mobile-friendly site and not having one pretty, uh, graphically. The first one is of this website – the one I set up with Dudamobile a couple of weeks ago:
Mobile Traffic – Writing Resources
While it’s not going to win any traffic awards, it’s a lot better than my Sihanoukville Journal was doing until I installed it properly on WP a couple of days ago:
Mobile Traffic – Sihanoukville Journal
The irony of it is that my Journal site is the premium one, while this one is the free version, so you’d think I’d have been more careful when setting it up. The main difference between the 2 is that the free version comes with ads, while the premium one does not. Since I’d rather be generating revenue from my own ads (including Dudamobile) than advertising for others, I’ll probably upgrade soon.
Another difference between the free and premium deals is that with a premium account, you get your own “m[dot]domain name” address, whereas you have to settle for a “dudamobile[dot]domain name” address in the free edition. That’s something I also forgot to do, so as soon as I wind this up, I’ll change it.
Free or paid, you need to go mobile or face an uncertain online future. Now that I’ve got a smartphone, I understand why they’re becoming so popular and why, barring some catastrophic global disaster, they are destined to replace mobile phones just as TV replaced radio and word processing software replaced typewriters. The smartphone is the internet marketer’s best friend. Ignore it at your peril.
Pingback: Sihanoukville Journal Goes Mobile