How Can I Make My Site iPhone Friendly?

[RobDalton]

I have been looking into making my website for iphone friendly as my analytics are not great for the iphone and I know when I try to navigate around it on an iphone it can be tough.

I was told that if I make changes to the layout that it would affect my layout across everything, which I did not want to do. So I have two questions:

1. Is this correct regarding the layout?

2. If so, if you did something like m.waikoloavacationrentals.com which would be the mobile version how would that possibly effect your rankings with regards to the traffic distribution?

Any feedback would be appreciated.  Also if anyone has any experience in doing this I would be interested in discussing further.

[GregB123]

Hi Rob. I'm guessing your site is not responsive?

So is the navigation issue related to what is clicked to go from page to page? If the buttons are just too tiny, you may be able to enlarge them using CSS for handheld devices like the iphone. If it is because of dropdowns that require a mouse click to operate correctly, then you may have to replace them with different type of dropdowns.

Or if a site rework is planned, then going responsive fixes these "small device" issues. I use Twitter Bootstrap for responsive and love it.

[RobDalton]

Thanks!  For some reason I just got this.  I think it is more just a lot of the buttons are smaller and I really just need a "new look" for mobile.  My current site seems to be great for an ipad or desktop, but just the design is not good for a iphone.

[katemorris]

Hi Rob,

Great question and I am glad you are looking into how your site responds to mobile users. It sounds like you are having some issues with smartphone users.

To be clear, it's best if you approach this problem from a screen size rather than a specific phone type. Your website works fine on tablets, but it's smart phones you have a problem with. You can do a responsive design that changes based on the user screen size rather than phone type which can get really hard to develop for really quickly.

Here is a guide we have developed for all things mobile design and SEO. We highly recommend making your site responsive (no need for m.domain.com or domain.com/mobile), which will take care of any issues with linking in the future, shares, and all other forms of user confusion as well as search engine confusion.

Also here are mobile recommendations straight from Google.

Hope that helps!