Is Your Website Mobile? Part 2

People are so entrenched in the information they can gather from their mobile devices these days that they expect to be able to get what they are looking for on a mobile device… exactly when they want it. This is the case even though most real estate websites are not formatted for use on the mobile device. People have turned to apps from companies like Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com. There’s nothing wrong with this… in fact they have great apps, however, it presents an opportunity for you as the agent to take back this consumer.

There is a good chance that the real estate consumer who texts-in for information was not aware of you or your firm prior to that text message. Now you have just provided them the exact information they wanted at the precise time they wanted it by incorporating a text message solution on your listings. In addition, if you had a mobile website, where they were able to not only get information on the property that they were looking at, but search the entire MLS, use GPS to see the 10 closest listings to the one they just looked at and get all your contact information as the agent who has provided them this information, they would be thoroughly impressed. I would go so far as to say that if you were able to provide this experience to a potential real estate consumer, the chances you could convert them to a buyer or seller have just increased dramatically.

However, if standard practices are not adhered to, potential pitfalls can occur. A poor mobile website portrays a bad impression of you and your business, potentially turning away customers. You must recognize that the needs of mobile browsers are different from PC Internet users. Based on knowledge of your customers, you should focus your message, so that it is contextual to the mobile arena and targets your mobile browsers’ needs. This must be achieved while also keeping your brand identity and marketing message consistent with your other communication media. A poorly designed mobile website will not be credible. As with the PC Internet, it is vital that mobile websites are easily accessible and are optimized for search and discovery tools.

Due to issues such as small screen sizes, slower download speeds and device incompatibility, industry standards around the Mobile Web are imperative. With the rush to create mobile websites we are seeing a wide variance in the quality of the websites created - from the captivating to the single static page.

Guidelines for mobile website development have been released by The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an international community where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop web standards. dotMobi engaged with the W3C Mobile Web Initiative (MWI) to help formulate the MWI Best Practices for mobile content. The practices outline a number of ways to achieve good user experiences on mobile Web-enabled devices, and recognized several methods of implementing these practices. These are intended to communicate to website developers how to improve the user experience, thus ensuring that the Mobile Web is more reliable and accessible.

The unique challenges inherent to Mobile Web include:
• Size of screen on most mobile devices.
• Scrolling on a mobile phone.
• Typing on a mobile phone.

In addition, there are wide variations in the capabilities of mobile devices; from the smallest mobile phone, to PDA handsets, to laptops with mouse and QWERTY capabilities.

The W3C and dotMobi guidelines include catering for these challenges as well as a renewed focus on website efficiency. These key elements are:
• Minimizing the number of clicks. An additional click may be a minor irritation on a PC, but on a mobile phone it is a bigger issue, information is expected quickly.
• Reducing the number of kilobytes in each downloaded page.
• Delivering specific information. Mobile devices are currently less likely to be used for general browsing but more for retrieving specific information.
There are many mobile services that provide mobile web technology that complies with the “W3C Mobile Web Best Practices”. Some optimize an existing non-mobile website for mobile use, and recognize when someone has come to the website from a mobile browser and redirects them to the mobile version. There are stand alone mobile sites. Determine which works best for you and GO MOBILE! Real estate agents with standards-compliant search-optimized mobile websites will clearly have a competitive advantage. You can become the destination for real estate information mobile devices of consumers in your local market if you format your listing information for mobile.

Sources: Sybase, a SAP mobile intelligence company; Google Insights; Nubiq; REALTOR.com®; RISMedia