How mobile-friendly is your bar’s website?

Posted by ianmara on Jan 3, 2012 in Bar Marketing | 3 comments

It will come as a shock to no one that the use of smartphones is at an all-time high. At last check more than 1/3 of American adults own one of the devices. And according to at least one study, 90 percent of owners use their phones as an Internet portal, with 4 of 5 doing so every single day.

Which means if you’ve been listening to your friendly neighborhood social media marketing company and doing the right things with Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, quite a few folks are going to be accessing your website with their phones.  And it is up to you to make sure their experience is a good one.

Here are a few things you can do to ensure those who search you out on their cell phone (i.e. potential customers) are pleased with what they find:

Don’t go crazy with the images: Large pictures take time for a cell phone to process, which means delays as a reader tries to (for example) find your menu. Don’t completely compromise the full experience for those viewing the site on a laptop, but smaller images are probably a good idea. Given that the iPhone does not support Flash, you should probably avoid its use on your site.

Make sure your street address is easy to use: People have different requirements when it comes to a restaurant’s website, but address is probably the most common need. When somebody is hunting for your address on his or her phone it’s because they’re A. planning a route, B. are lost, or C. are trying to send the information to a friend. So make your address user-friendly – Have it featured prominently, link it to a map service (preferably Google) and make it easy to copy-and-paste. In other words, don’t have it saved as an image.

Place an emphasis on readability and simplicity: Make sure there are no clashing colors or fonts which force a smartphone user to blow up a corner of your page five times just to figure out when the kitchen closes. Keep in mind they could be looking at this in the backseat of a cab or while standing in line for a movie. And keep your front page as basic as possible, allowing a simple menu to guide users to additional content you have available.

Update your content: Nothing will make a customer more angry than if a menu item or happy hour offering they found while hunting for somewhere to stop turns out to be six weeks old. The web is great because it is so easily manipulated – take advantage.

Also:

-Ensure that your menus are viewable in all the major mobile operating systems (iPhone, Android, Blackberry). After address and hours, menu might the next thing people want to check out on your site. Avoiding the PDF format for menus is probably a good idea.

-Make sure your menu buttons are large. This will be helpful to the finger-clicking process that goes along with smartphone usage.

-Say no to auto-refresh. This adds to download time and hinders the common practice of friends passing a phone back and forth to examine your menu.