It can sometimes feel like the website industry as a whole moves at a ridiculously fast pace. No sooner had companies come to grips with the concept of SEO and the importance of having a user-friendly website that they now have to face up to the prospect of mobile website design in order to ensure their company remains relevant.
As much as it is tempting to think that a standard website should keep you covered, it is important to remember that more people are using mobile devices to access the web than ever before and that search engine algorithms now differ between mobile and desktop, with mobile algorithms favouring sites that have been designed to be responsive on mobile devices. As such, you not only need to consider having a mobile site developed, but you also need to ensure that it is done right.
Maximizing Space
A good mobile website design company, like 2marketing.com, understands that to make the best use of the mobile platform you need to ensure that you do everything you can with the limited amount of space that is afforded to you.
Having a design that feels cluttered or requires tons of pinching and scrolling just to get to the interesting content is simply going to lead to people moving on to a different site. You need to consider your navigational structure, how content is presented and how easy it is to access when developing a mobile website.
Avoid Typing
Ideally, mobile users should be able to contact your website with as little need to type as possible. This is because it can be very awkward to type on a mobile device and still get your message across.
As such, be sure to only make use of text boxes when they are absolutely vital. A good mobile website design will instead use drop-down menus and other workarounds to ensure that users spend as little time possible attempting to type into a tiny space.
Consider Site Speed
The speed that your website operates at is very important, particularly for users who live in areas where high-speed connections are not available. As such, you still need to consider overall accessibility when creating your website.
This means that every element needs to be optimized. While having an image-heavy site may look nice, one of the key elements of mobile website design is understanding how such elements impact on the site as a whole and how they will affect users as they try to navigate. By cutting page load times down you not only ensure people don’t navigate away, but also that your site is looked on more favourably by search engines.
No Big Chunks of Text
Content on a mobile site needs to be considered differently to that in a standard website. Mobile website design often centers on taking a lot of content and presenting it in a way that can be digested easily by the user.
As such, you need to avoid massive chunks of text that will cause the user to have to spend too much time straining their eyes at their phone just to find the information they need. Highlight everything that is important by separating it out and making it easy to access and, as importantly, to read.
