Optimizing Your Site for the Mobile Web
The mobile browser market is a rapidly evolving and growing field with more new devices and apps introduced each month. Adapting your website for the mobile web is not a luxury, but a necessity.
A good mobile design matches the needs of consumers. Mobile users need quick access to main sources of information without a lot of the extra material often found in the desktop versions of their favorite sites. Here are some things to keep in mind as you create your mobile designs:
- Keep it simple. To accommodate the smaller screen sizes and slower connection speeds, scale down each page to a few key items and articles. Users are looking for quick and obvious information from their mobile sites.
- Resize your images. Downloading several images can bring a mobile device to a crawl. Reduce the number of images in your mobile design, and use a graphics package to resize the images so they are optimized in quality and sized for a smaller screen.
- Scroll vertically. Readers can more easily read your page when they only have to scroll vertically. Limit yourself to one column of information in portrait orientation and two columns in landscape.
- Make your links accessible. Clicking a small hypertext link is extremely difficult to do on a mobile device with a touch screen interface. Create hypertext links that are easy to locate and activate.
Above all, test your site on a variety of devices and under different conditions. Mobile devices vary greatly in size, shape, and capability. What works on one device might fail utterly on another. Testing your code on a desktop computer is only the first step; you may also need access to the devices themselves. Even emulators cannot always capture the nuances involved in the performance of an actual mobile device.
