Phone hyperlinks for your website
Simple and effective
by Iain Wilson
No-one can have any doubt about the massive increase of web use on mobile phone devices. Apparently, over 1 million mobile phones are activated every day and there are now more mobile phones in the world than there are people!
So, it's a pretty good bet that someone will view your website on a mobile phone at some point. There is some debate on whether websites should be optimised for mobile usage, (see article on responsive web design), but here's a really simple tip that might have big benefits for very little effort.
Ask yourself two questions:
- What do you want people to do when they visit your site?
- What are mobile phones good for?
Answers:
- You want them to get in touch (okay, if you're running an ecommerce site you want them to buy, but stay with me on this).
- Mobile phones are good for making phone calls (doh!).
Well, with a very simple bit of coding you can make it really easy for them to phone you from your website.
Wherever you have your phone number on your website, you can turn it into a hyperlink that will call your number when it is clicked/touched on a smartphone device.
That's a pretty powerful facility - it makes it EASY for them to call you. They don't have to type in the number, they just click/touch.
Most browsers such as those on iPhones and Android smartphones have this facility, and you can implement it on your webpages in no time at all.
Example
Let's say your office number is 0131 111 9999. To create a mobile phone hyperlink, all you need to do is add the following HTML hyperlink code to your page.
Call us on 0131 111 9999
Obviously, you can put any text you like in the hyperlink, but the key is to put tel: followed by the number in the href attribute.
Try it out!
Don't take our word for it. Navigate to this page on your mobile's browser then click the link below.
Your smartphone will display the number and ask you to confirm you want to go ahead and call it.
Might be the difference between getting a call from a new customer or not.
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