Building a mobile-friendly website requires a certain degree of knowledge. The mobile application development process involves thinking through an array of usability concerns that many users choose not to acknowledge. There are some people who believe that a mobile-ready website is not necessary to be successful on the web. Most people, however, would agree that you probably do. There are many ways to improve the mobile-friendliness of your website. Here are the top five tips that will get your mobile site up and running the right way.
1. Use Fluid Widths and Responsive Design
There are far too many devices on the market for a developer to find success building an app with one fixed width. Between dozens of Android models, the iPhone and iPad as well as all the tablet devices currently available, it is simply unrealistic to assume that one fixed with will work across all devices. The solution to this problem is fluid widths and responsive design.
Fluid widths automatically adapt to the width of the web browser. Regardless of the user’s smartphone or device, the website will look good throughout.
WordPress makes it easy to take advantage of fluid widths. Just start with a theme that was developed with mobile responsive design in mind. TwentyEleven is the default theme that comes with WordPress sites and it supports mobile responsive design. You can also check out Genesis, which is one of the top two WordPress framework themes currently on the market.
2. Compress Your Images
Images not adequately compressed for web use hog bandwidth. The key here is to reduce the file size that has to be downloaded and not to simply make the width and height of the image smaller. As a rule of thumb, never make users download a lot of data content on their mobile devices when you can avoid it. Users will especially appreciate the faster loading speeds that come with compressed file sizes. Best of all, the search engines will do the same.
3. Make Buttons Larger than 44 Pixels
Finger tap technology designed to simulate a mouse click makes it hard for smartphone users to click on website buttons. Your goal as a mobile designer is to make buttons large enough that users can press them without needing to zoom in. The mobile application development community has formed a general consensus to make smartphone buttons at least 44 pixels wide and 44 pixels tall. This size is easy for users to click on across a wide variety of smartphones and mobile devices.
4. Keep Choices to a Minimum
If you are building a mobile-friendly website, it is best to narrow down the choices. Aim to have no more than five different choices for the navigation and make the main parts of your site easily accessible. Keep in mind that this is much different from building a website for a desktop viewer, in which it would make sense to have a dozen links in the navigation bar and ten pages of content on the home page. On a mobile device, you simply don’t have the space. You also want to include a link to your full version site on the footer of your mobile-friendly website.
5. Test, Then Test Again
Your mobile application may look great on an iPhone, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it will look the same on an Android. It is important to test your mobile website on as many different devices as you can get your hands on. Chances are you will find that your site displays properly on some operating system but not on others. Your mission is to actively seek out these types of errors and fix them.
The goal of any mobile application development project is to create an app that looks great and functions properly regardless of the smartphone or tablet it operates on. With these five helpful tips, it should be much easier for you to achieve this goal.
Light Speed Solutions is a custom software development company that specializes in mobile application development. Contact us today to discuss your mobile app development needs. Our goal is to design, develop and deliver quality mobile app development solutions on time and on budget.
Category: Mobile Development
