How to make travel websites more friendly

According to the latest statistics, in the year 2014 it is expected that at least one billion users around the world will use a mobile device for payments. Obviously travel and hospitality industry just cannot ignore such a market development move.

To keep users of iPhones, Androids, and windows mobile systems on your website and as a result sell more ahead of competitors, travel trade professionals follow their customers by developing the mobile-friendly versions of their websites.

Whether we like it or not, as a matter of fact a number of users accessing the web via mobile increases rapidly, and travel and hospitality services providers need to adapt to the market development. Tourism Review editors come with some of the essential yet basic recommendations in order to make the mobile edition of your website more attractive for potential mobile users.

Getting the very right thing first, it is just not wise to serve your mobile and desktop customers on the same site. The most common option is creating the third level domain in format like m.tourism-review.com, where tourism-review.com – is the main domain for desktop users. Make sure that script for detection and redirection of mobile users is installed on your main domain, to ensure they are redirected to the mobile domain automatically.

Avoid flash and JavaScript. Flash is also a significant issue. It is common that due to safety and other reasons many mobile devices do not support these technologies. So just keep your mobile version in a plain HTML format for your mobile-friendly travel website. It would be better to show to mobile users a bit less media-rich content than he or she will see no page at all.

The same way as on the desktop website version, the content is the king. However for the mobile website version you need to keep your content even briefer and clearer. As far as mobile version of a website is concerned, less is more – a definitely through.

Content should also be unique and informative. You need to keep the focus and initiate a call to action as quickly as possible. In the mobile edition grabbing the reader’s attention right away is “the must”. Also, quite importantly, be sure your headlines are persuasive and original that enable readers to get the point right away.

Making a clear and easy navigation is also a focal point. Smart and practical navigation means prioritizing key areas and important pages of the website for easy access using bigger buttons, smarter colors, fonts etc. Essentially, you have to provide your visitors with distinct and clear ways for getting to your most important content.

Either you follow the above suggestions or not we strongly recommend testing your mobile edition, before launching it. A good tool for checking compatibility across web browsers and devices could be found here: www.w3.org/Mobile/ . Test all levels of your application, not just simple homepage check.