If you’re looking to improve the mobile friendliness of your website, these tips can help.
Limit Options
In years past, websites were built for desktop viewing. They offered visitors lots of reading material on the home page and a host of links to navigate the site. While this layout isn’t wrong as far as web design goes, it simply doesn’t work for mobile devices. Mobile devices are so small, it would be virtually impossible for a viewer to navigate that kind of site.
If your goal is to attract more mobile viewers, it’s important to narrow your choices. For navigation, try to keep links to a minimum. No more than four or five links should do. Link to the most important parts of your site and if you want to direct people to other areas, try to include those links within the content or on secondary pages.
Streamlining your website, while still offering the necessary navigation is one of the easiest ways to make it more mobile friendly.
Avoid Fixed Widths
Fixed width websites are a big no-no when targeting mobile viewers. There is a vast amount of mobile devices on the market today. And because they come in a variety of screen sizes with varying resolutions, there’s simply no way a fixed width website will work.
Instead, you’ll want to design your website with a fluid width wherever possible. Fluid width websites automatically adjust to the size of the browser a viewer is using and therefore looks good on any device.
Limit Images
Many mobile service providers limit the amount of bandwidth their customers can use on a monthly basis. Because of these limits, many people won’t visit sites that suck their bandwidth faster than an F5 tornado.
Images are notorious bandwidth hogs and oftentimes unnecessary. In addition, they can skew the page when viewing on small devices. Sure, they make your site pretty, but before adding an image; ask yourself if it is necessary. Can you deliver the same message without the use of the image? If so, skip the image.
Use Finger-Friendly Buttons
Most smartphones today offer touchscreen capability. Users navigate sites and click buttons with the touch of a finger. For this reason, your website buttons should be large enough for viewers to press without having to zoom in. The more finger-friendly your site is, the longer viewers will stay on your site – and the more often they will return.
While device developer’s opinions vary, the general consensus of website designers is for buttons to be a minimum of 44 pixels tall by 44 pixels wide. This ensures they are large enough to click on any smartphone.
Test, Then Test Some More
Never assume that just because your site looks good on one device that it’ll look good on another. Test your website on as many different devices as possible. There are several online simulators that can help with this as well as check your site for any issues and fix them quickly.
Here are three you can try:
- W3C mobileOK Checker will check your site and give you a list of any issues it finds. It offers suggestions on how you can fix those errors.
- Ready.Mobi analyzes your website to see whether or not it is optimized mobile devices. You will need to create an account to test your entire website, but you can test individual pages without an account.
- Google Mobile Testing will allow you to see your website in mobile format so you can check whether or not it is showing up correctly.
With just a little planning, you can create a mobile friendly website that looks great regardless of the device your viewers use.
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