Nowadays, due to increasing popularity and usage of tablets, Smartphone, and other mobile devices, business owners who runs websites and blogs for their business, cannot afford not to own a mobile friendly website.
Since mobile devices are hand-free and wearable most of the people today accessing website through it and according to the studies in a near future the mobile online usage will advance and increase.
Now, if your business website is not mobile friendly, potential customers and clients will not stay around for long, so meaning you may lose a potential clients and profits as well.
Actually there are number of methods how to build a mobile-friendly website. If you want to create website through CMS like WordPress, then you may use free plugin such as WPTouch that improves the display of you web pages in iPhone, iPad and other popular Smartphone. If you want to have a flawless display of web pages on all phone screen sizes then you may use premium responsive theme. Usually the exceptional premium themes costs $25 dollars, but believe me investment is worth the price.
However, plugins and responsive themes are not enough, website design as well plays an important role to have a mobile friendly website. The following are some tips:
1. Make it Short and Simple
Your website has to be light, make it simple and brief and include only the elements that are important to your business like contact, company profile, and shopping cart to name a few. A website loaded with a lot of pages will come out messy on mobile gadgets, as well it load slowly.
2. Avoid Flash
Flash can augment the look of your site but not necessarily helpful for a mobile friendly website. Since iPhone don’t favor flash, users of this device don’t prefer to visit website with Flash animations. Just stick to the plain text-based content that makes your site to have a well display on all types and sizes of screen and most probably visitors will love your site.
3. Disable all Pop-Ups
For desktop user pop-ups are annoying but for mobile users it’s quite terrible. Pop-ups are quite good but only for desktop and laptop users but for the mobile users it could be a dreadful experience.
4. Check Your Mobile Website to Other Devices
Actually there are varieties of screen differences, it means that though your mobile website displaying well in iPad and iPhone, still there is a tendency that it will not show well on other lesser-known gadgets. You may use Screenfly to test website display on different screen sizes.
5. Put Importance on Usability
This can be done by creating obvious buttons and links that are noticeable and easy to “hit”, then provide a location and contact information on the homepage, or else, build it only just a click away, and opt to a font that is readable with proper size that suit to the phone screen width.
6. Limit the Size of Videos and Images
Videos and images definitely can slow down you website significantly and ruining the mobile experience of the user. But without video and images it makes your site plain and dull. What you need to do is to reduce or limit the sizes of your videos and images and make it available for non-HD video mobile users.
7. Let the Mobile User to Have an Option to View the Whole Site
This is very important because there are some users that only want to access a resource or a page of your site that is not accessible by default for the mobile website. Hence the link leading to whole version of the website should be located at the bottom of the page, where it doesn’t interfere.
Creating a mobile friendly website is not easy, there is no magic that can make your site mobile friendly instantly. There’s a lot of things need to consider and most importantly you need to recognize what kind of devices your target visitors are using, and then design and build your site for those.
17 comments
Great tip, The coming era is mobile era. Online businesses are focusing on mobiles mostly… so the reason to make the site responsive is very high!
Hi Stacy Carter, the tips are easy to understand and are very helpful. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, Raj! I am glad you liked the tips!
Well every blog should be optimized for mobile friendly website, and if you are using wordpress then it has lot of plugin to make mobile friendly blog.
The only thing is we should make our blog faster..
thanks for the tips.
I love Wordpress! You re right it is easy to build up a good sites with this platform due to a bunch of great plugins that help to manage the site. Thanks for reading the article!
I personally use my Ipod Touch whenever I’m out of the house and so many PTC sites that I use haven’t jumped on mobile compatibility yet. Its obnoxious to have to sift through a site when its setup for a full computer screen. Its even worse when the whole thing is based off of flash because Apple still doesn’t support it. I’m always happy when I do stumble across a site that’s setup for mobile (Apple compatible especially).
If you’re using wordpress then WPtouch is a great mobile plugin
If any one wants to create a mobile friendly website then it is obvious that it should be very simple. You should remove all flash stuff from you website to make the site load correctly and faster too
Thanks
If you consider few essential points while building these websites, you will be capable to enhance both its appearance and functionality.
And for those who are interested in using this power to promote their business or better serve their clients, it is important
that they choose a competent and professional service firms to develop their website.
Therefore, multimedia would be a good way to target a young audience.
One of the best way to make your website mobile friendly would be get a good wordpress theme and hire a professional to do the rest. #justlazythoughts
Great 7 tips, Stacy. It’s definitely a good idea to create a mobile friendly website, which is view-able on a standard browser on a computer, as well as on a table or smart phone. This will allow you to serve a large number of audience.
If you are using WordPress, then I highly recommend WPtouch.
Here’s the link to download WPtouch plugin for blogs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
There is leaps and bounce flourish in smartphone user counts and if you don’t have mobile version website you gonna loose these audience as well as precious clients.
Wow, this is just simply awesome,
Making a mobile version of your website which is fully compatible with any phone is what I wanted to do for long, thanks for these valuable tips, I will definitely try them and let you know about the results.
I am using WPTouch and I am happy with it. Anyways your tips are awesome. I will try not to use flash items.
Great post Stacy, everything is done via mobile these days. I think bloggers should take notice and implement some of these great tips. Thanks.
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