Being mobile-friendly is more than just fitting the small screen; a good mobile website has to be created exclusively keeping your mobile audiences in mind.
With 788 million mobile-only Internet users predicted by 2015, it’s high time you stop considering your mobile visitors secondary.
MobStac has been helping customers across the world go mobile for more than 2 years now. With experience comes learning and here are 5 key pointers that work like magic when you take your website mobile.
Don’t miniaturize, just optimize
52% of visitors are unlikely to return to a website which is not optimized for mobile phone viewing. A mobile website is not a miniature version of your current website.
Instead of trying to fit in all of your existing websites’ content, present the most relevant and important content first. Through a well-designed navigation structure, you can give access to more in-depth content.
Integrating mobile ads and monetizing traffic is important but be selective about the number of ads you display on a single page and their placement.
Here is how India’s leading national newspaper, The Hindu differentiates between its desktop website and mobile site.
Every device is important
When creating a mobile-optimized site, keep in mind that you are creating it for devices with varying screen sizes operating on various platforms.
Your mobile site has to work flawlessly on every available mobile and tablet device out there: iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Nokia and even feature phones with Opera browsers. You never know what your visitor uses, so the goal must be to ensure the content reaches the end user even if you have to sacrifice some amount of styling and design flourish.
Load 10x faster
Your mobile visitors are browsing on-the-go. To retain your visitor’s attention, your mobile site has to load in 5 seconds or less.
- Avoid heavy graphics
- Make sure images are resized automatically
- Load only the minimum set of CSS and JavaScript files; for modern browsers, take advantage of HTML5 and its rich feature set.
Automatically redirect your mobile visitors
Do not forget to redirect your mobile visitors automatically to your mobile site. Create a subdomain of your current website (typically m.yoursite.com) and redirect your mobile visitors to your mobile site depending on the device they use.
Thumb rules
Touch and click have taken over typing. Use check boxes and buttons on your mobile site so that users can navigate and input information easily instead of giving them long forms to fill.
These are our learnings; We’d love to hear the best practices you follow.
