Earlier this year I wrote a blog on how to make your dealership’s website mobile friendly, however a recent survey (based on an analysis of 1 million websites worldwide last year) found that 93.3% of websites are not mobile-compatible andwill not render successfully on mobiledevices, including smartphones. As Internet-content consumption is quicklymoving away from desktops to portable devices, ensuring your website is optimized for the smaller screens of tablets and smartphones is critically important. Commercial emails opened on mobile devices are on pace to surpass PC opens by the end of 2013, according to recent research from digital messaging solutions provider Knotice.

I cannot stress how important it is that your dealership’s website needs to be mobile friendly. If you don’t have a mobile friendly website - immediately get with your WSP to start working on one! Below are some tips to follow when you are creating your dealership’s mobile site:

• Make text larger for readability. Bonus tip: Consider offering a text resizing control.

• Increase padding and line-height of densely packed links to increase touch accuracy. This applies especially to form elements and calendar dropdowns.

• Remove mouse hover interactions wherever possible. If you want to keep them, extend them to support tap-and-hold interactions as well as mouse hover.

• Consider making your design resize-friendly to cover the full range of tablet screen sizes — from 600px to 1000px wide — instead of fixing page widths in stone.

• Beware of the Flash. With iPads such a big portion of the tablet market, Flash elements need to be removed.

• Remove elements using the declaration (real or simulated) "position: fixed" because they slow down page scrolling on tablets to a much greater extent than on desktop.

• Consider cutting some HTTP requests, as you would on mobile. While tablets have screen area close to that of laptops, their processing power is closer to that of phones. Additional on-page elements like Facebook Connect and Google +1 might fit into a tablet-sized wireframe but real-world performance and user experience can quickly suffer.

If you want more help on making your website tablet friendly, this eBook is a great resource.There are best practices, layouts, and case studies on effective mobile designs. If you have any additional tips, feel free to comment below!