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Imagine you spent time cooking a nice dinner for your unknown guest, made wonderful decorations with candles and roses, you set the table with nice plates and everything that makes a dinner worth remembering. You expects and hope your quest would be wow by your great preparations and the taste of your quality meal. As every minute passes by, you just can’t wait anymore, you wants your quest to walk in as soon as possible to enjoy, not just the tasty meal you’ve PREPARED but to see the wonderful dinner settings you’ve made.

Suddenly, a blind man walked in, managed to sit down after being given a huge of welcome, not seeing the decorations, not noticing the beautiful plates, the candles, and roses, not even seeing you nor how the food looks like. He sad down and began to enjoy the meal. Imagine the disappointment you’d feel? All the hours of efforts you put in to make a great dinner settings for your quest’s appreciation has just been LOST!

The same scenario is exactly what you get with mobile web traffic – mobile website’s traffic are like the blind guest, they taste only the food, they never see the dinner decorations. Every website owner pays detailed attention not just to the web contents but the web designs and branding, robust back-end coding, and other aspects of the website that add to the user’s experience.

For your site to be fully appreciated and enjoyed the way it should be, every of these aspects has to be in place. But what mobile website applications does is, leave the majority of your website’s whistles and bells and serve users only the scrappy mobile version of your site, delivered in an incomplete format.

As far as Website is concerned, It’s not just only the text contents that matters, everything matters and I would like my users to enjoy every bit of my site. In this article, I will focus much more on Blogs even though my objections and views in this regard apply to all mobile websites

I have never been a fan of mobile website and mobile traffic right from beginning — Though WealthResult.com is currently enabled for mobile view, I’m seriously considering disabling it based on the obvious hatred I now have for the mobile applications, and here are my reasons.

I-hate-mobile-websites

1. No Sidebars on Mobile Websites

 

I so much belief the major part of every website is always on the sidebars — there you have most of your major and additional plugins. On mobile websites, the entire sidebars are always missing — leaving your mobile traffic out of one of the greatest features of your site.

I’ve tried browsing with most mobile apps and never see any that displays sidebars except you go full web version which usually looks bad on mobile too. When your sidebar is missing, half of your site is missing — and whatever thing you put in there will be useless to your mobile web traffic.

2. Commenting is Difficult on Mobile Websites

The best and the most engaging part of every Blog is the comment feature — without it, your Blog turn out to be almost irrelevant and boring. But no visitor would like to comment when the comment system is difficult or nonexistent, which is indeed how commenting on the mobile version of your website is right now.

Look at what happens everyday on your website: Users comes to your website through mobile applications, read your posts, have something important to say, but unable to say it due to your mobile website’s bad comment system! How long are you going to continue with this?Your site need the engaging factor of regular comments but unable to get it because your traffic comes through mobile applications which makes it difficult for them to leave comments behind.

3. Social Sharing is Zero on Mobile Websites

Who will deny the importance of social sharing in getting your website contents across to larger audience within the social circles like Facebook and Twitter? While some mini browsers like the Opera Mini has the ability to display share buttons, many doesn’t and even those that have are quite unusable because they’re tiny and difficult to notice.

When there is no social sharing, there is no spread of your site’s content, and the usefulness of the content will be lost. Worst still, most mobile browsers don’t support cookie to enable users stays logged in on the social sites for easy sharing of your contents. Can you now see why too many people aren’t sharing your contents?

4. Videos and Images are Buggy on Mobile Websites

Some Bloggers summarize their contents or even deliver part of their contents in videos. I don’t use much videos on WealthResult.com but I know others does, and if you do, be assured that most of your mobile traffic are missing that important part of your contents.

The reason is because, most smart phone don’t support video streaming not even minding that video has become the integral part of website’s contents nowadays. So, if you are a website owner who rely much on video contents, you may as well be the only one consuming your videos if your site’s traffic are mostly mobile apps users. Then my question: How would you be enjoying traffic that doesn’t make use of the better part of your website?

5. Mobile Web Traffic are Mostly Myopic 

 

From my study so far, it seems that Mobile traffic tends to disrespect websites and show little regard to the effort the site owners put to create wonderful contents. They seem to view every Blog post just like mobile SMS delivered to their phone from unknown sender — they view it sceptically.

It takes the full version of your website viewed with Laptop or Desktop to to fully convey the message to site visitors and help them see the glory of your website. Without this, your website and it’s contents may likely be disrespected.The Site-Owner/Users relationship (the trust and respect) usually created by the sheer glory of your website are always not there with mobile traffic.

6. All Mobile Websites Seem to Look Alike

On mobile views, BBC.com will be seen as the same or even worst than the poorest Blog on the net. Yahoo, Google, TechCrunch, CNet.com, CNN, and all the great sites are seen and respected by mobile application based users as being on the same design as Urpoor.com. I think there is no other better way to explain why I hate mobile websites than this. How on earth wouldn’t there be distinction between what is great and what is not!

7. Mobile Websites are Difficult to Monetize

For most Bloggers, Money is the rule of the game and if you are not able to make money out of your blogging efforts, you may as well be wasting your precious time. Every site owner strive to monetize their traffic using different possible means. And the bigger your traffic, the more options you have for monetization but, if the bulk of your traffic are mobile users, you’ll sure have problems monetizing it.

Mobile traffic is just too difficult to monetize — even Facebook finds is extremely difficult to make money from it’s huge mobile traffic until recently. Then why the traffic when it can’t make you a dime? Adward advertisers are known to pay very minimal per click for clicks emanating from mobile users, while some are not even showing ads on mobile devices.

8. Branding is a Mess on Mobile Websites

Your branding is what distinguish you from other Site owners, that’s why you spent huge time and resources to create unique and appealing brand for your website. You expect your users to see and appreciate it. But that seems not possible with mobile web traffic as your website is rendered in a scrappy, suppressed version that makes it difficult for mobile users to see your graphics in it’s full version.

Like the blind guest who only enjoys the food’s taste but never see the beauty of the dishes and the decorations, mobile traffic only consume the contents and never appreciates the quality of the sites design and branding — and as a result, never have any lasting impression of the sites they visits.

9. Subscription is [No] for Mobile Users

People don’t subscribe to your products when they come to your site through mobile applications, that’s the fact either you like it or not,  that is if there is even a displayable subscription form to start with. This is another area mobile traffic is just too useless.

Conversion of mobile traffic is generally poor, it’s all about getting and never give. This days web traffic is turning to something else due to the information overload. Everything is made easy on the net so much that Internet users begin to see web contents as their birth right – forgetting that someone spent time, effort, and resources to create them. When it comes to getting and never give syndrome, mobile traffic is the worst culprit.

10. Everything is not Just OK with Mobile Internet

With mobile applications, what you get is crippled Internet. Ninety percent of the Internet is left behind, making mobile users loose out from the Internet greater experiences.

Nevertheless, there are some little advantages — at lease someone in the remote part of the world who doesn’t have money to buy laptop can be able to enjoy 10% of the Internet experience with his mobile phone and phone applications. Someone on transit can access the Internet with her mobile phone to have some quickies. Beyond that, there is nothing good with mobile Internet!

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9 Comments

  • Boye September 17, 2012

    I see a future where someone out there will see your argument as an opportunity to overhaul the current attitude or protocol that dulls the website experience of phone browsing.

  • Darlinton Omeh September 17, 2012

    Boye, you're perfectly right and thats why i'm sticking my neck on this. I'm just seeing some error on this post but unable to edit it cos am on mobile right now… Can you see that? Lol

  • Anold Phil September 18, 2012

    We have some reservations for mobile sites we just tend to swallow the frustration.

    This is the first time am seeing a full fledged argument on the subject, hope this spark off greater discussions about mobile websites. Thanks man!

  • Macandy Agha September 23, 2012

    I wish we could go back to the days when nokia 3310 was a big game, cyber cafe operators are screaming harder. For me am thinking of linking my blog posts to an offer that is connected to my bank account. Its bugging me here too

  • Darlinton Omeh September 23, 2012

    Agha, I seriously agree with you. In those days, websites grows faster and revenue was bomb, until the arrival of smart phones. Now, advertisers are crying, publishers wailing, and taffic going blind. The only people benefiting are the mobile operators.

  • Anonymous October 1, 2012

    Thank you for the auspicious writeup. It in fact was amusement account. Look advanced too far added agreeable from you! By the way, how could we communicate?

  • Anonymous October 2, 2012

    I don't even know how I ended up here, but I thought this post was good. I don't know who you are but definitely you are going to a famous blogger if you
    aren't already 😉

    Cheers!

  • Dou Lawrence Sambo March 24, 2013

    @Darlinton Try and Use Mobstac which enable adsense to display on even Mobile phones no matter which phone u use as far as its Internet Enable.Just google search that but u just have to pay monthly dues but it works effectively.

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