Mobile Websites
With the number of users accessing websites through mobile devices increasing every day, it becomes necessary to offer them a proper viewing experience when visiting your site. Unless you have specifically developed a mobile-friendly site, your websites will most likely fail to render correctly on a mobile device due the difference in mobile browsers and a much smaller screen real estate to display content. The capabilities of mobile browsers vary among different models and brands available in the market. In addition, a typical mobile browser may not render Flash or execute client-side scripts. Ultimately, the user experience will be compromised when mobile websites are not available.
Mobile visitors are often potential customers, as they tend to be looking for specific information rather than engaging in random browsing. Frequently they look for location specific information. So how do you make sure you do not alienate your mobile visitors? Rather than displaying the desktop version of your site, a better option would be to provide a mobile version that can function correctly on a variety of different mobile devices. Mobile sites can be hosted in a sub-domain like m.yoursite.com or in a separate .mobi top-level domain. Using a sub-domain instead of .mobi is preferable since it allows users to bookmark your website on a desktop and later access it from a mobile device.
Effective Mobile Website Design Traits:
- Keep it simple.
- Avoid or minimize usage of images.
- Provide enough whitespace to reduce clutter.
- Keep important information "above the fold".
- Move menu/links to the bottom.
- Avoid Flash and JavaScript.
- Keep page sizes small - users may have to pay more for mobile bandwidth. This also allows for faster downloading over a slower mobile connection.
- Prioritize content - display only content that's relevant to the mobile user.
- Users visit your mobile site to find specific information. They may want to get information on a specific product, rather than browse your entire catalog. The information architecture for the mobile site should take this into account.
- Find a balance between the number of clicks the user has to perform to get to a specific page and the number of links on a single page.
Mobile Website Design
Innolance takes all of the above aspects into careful consideration to ensure that the website or web application is usable and effective for mobile users. At Innolance, we do our best to deliver sites that work across the maximum number of devices and browsers available in today’s market.