People are abandoning their desktop computers for mobile devices at a breakneck pace — nearly two-thirds of all American adults (63%) use their cell phones to go online, and this number is growing fast. For all businesses, including car washes like yours, this makes the need to make your website accessible to mobile devices very apparent. Here are a few ways that you can make your car wash’s website mobile friendly:
Make Sure That People Won’t Have Trouble Entering Their Information
There are countless names out there, and a mobile device’s dictionary can only account for a small percentage of them. Most mobile keyboards come equipped with a (usually) helpful autocorrect feature.
One of the main words that a person could have trouble with entering is their own name due to their device’s autocorrect feature’s refusal to accept it. As such, it is important for you to add an attribute for your forms that will turn autocorrect off. This same logic applies to street addresses, cities, etc. Here are a few other ways to make your forms easier to use:
- Auto toggle to the number pad for numerical entry points like phone numbers
- Auto capitalize names, streets, cities, etc
- Identify spaces designated for email so that keyboards will automatically include the ‘@’ symbol without hitting shift
Make Sure That Your Website Fills Up the Entire Screen
Desktop versions of websites tend to show up on mobile screens awkwardly, with an unnecessarily large portion of the background taking up extra space. This will make your website difficult to view and displeasing aesthetically. To avoid this, make sure that the website is set to a mobile friendly width.
After doing this, many of your pictures will overwhelm the screen, because they were originally made to fit desktop screens. You can prevent this from occurring by setting all image widths to 100%. The same thing should be done for your input fields.
Don’t Permanently Disable Submit Buttons
We understand that you don’t want people hammering away at submit buttons so many times that you end up getting flooded with unnecessary duplicates. But permanently disabling a button after it is clicked would be a mistake for those who are trying to be mobile friendly.
Unlike a desktop computer, which is linked to a reliable hard line internet connection, mobile devices use cellular internet connections that can go out at any time.
This means that once someone has clicked on a button, they would not be able to proceed to the next step on your website if they happened to pass through a dead zone while the data was still transferring. If you can’t bring yourself to completely remove a disable feature, at least set it to reactivate after a few seconds.
It is critical that you take actions to make your website mobile friendly ASAP, but this is only part of what you need to know. To learn more about how to make your car wash’s website more mobile friendly, stay tuned for part 2 in this series.