Last year, on April 24th, Google released its search engine update that punished the websites which lacked mobile-friendly pages, by lowering their search results. Although the update roll out was received with mixed feelings, no one could deny that Google had a very good reason behind, now infamous, Mobilegeddon. Ever since 2014, mobile devices became go-to tools for searching the web. Going against this fact means purposefully alienating the majority of potential website visitors. Let us see then what you can do to create a mobile-friendly website, and keep both your customers and the Googleplex behemoth happy.
Don’t Make a Separate Website for the Mobile Users
In the past few years, businesses were trying to address the issue of mobile users by creating the mobile web – websites with limited content that were more suitable for mobile devices. In the meantime, it became very evident that it is not possible to control what kind of content the website visitors want. That is why you should not create a separate, mobile-friendly version of your website, but rather rethink the existing one from the grounds up.
Choose an Affordable Hosting Solution
Serious remodeling of your website will require some time and resources. Try mitigating this problem by opting for some affordable hosting company that will do its best to address both of these issues. The inexpensive hosting market segment is becoming increasingly competitive, and the companies are doing their best to attract new clients with affordable prices, reliable performance, and various discounts – Siteground coupon is one of the first things that comes to mind. Use this to your advantage.
Try to Be as Responsive as Possible
Or, in other words, use the design that will be easily visible on different screen sizes. This will reduce the amount of work website developers need to put into creating a website and reduce its cost in the process. Responsive design makes use of flexible images, flexible grid layouts and cascading stylesheet media queries. All these elements allow webpage to identify the visitors’ screen size and adjust the content accordingly. Responsive frameworks – like Bootstrap – are well documented, very easy to navigate and, last but not least, open source (free).
Think with the Thumb
Keep in mind that the mobile users will not use the mouse pointer to navigate your website – and mouse pointer and thumb (or index finger) are two drastically different input tools. You will have to please both of them without ruining the party for anyone. Do that by creating easy-to-navigate menus, big font sizes and even bigger buttons (Apple’s design guidelines recommend at least 44x44px), and targets that will be hard to miss even with fat fingers.
Make Design as Simple as Possible
Mobile users have a very limited attention span – the mobile devices are usually used for browsing the web on-the-go. That is why you should keep your menu layout as simple as possible. Hiding the important info under tons of menus, or preventing the website from loading quickly with too many bells and whistles will only make the website visitor lose attention and wander off to your competition.
Make Content Digestible
The content on your website should follow the same rules. It should be short, sweet and easily digestible. Lengthy paragraphs, fluffy text and failing to make a point will fill the website with unnecessary clutter and make the visitors lose their interest. Same goes for the images and videos. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, a thousand pictures may prove to be overwhelming even for the most tenacious. Your phone number, location and contact info should take the proud place on the top of each page.
Keep Java on the Minimum
No one can argue that JavaScript is a tremendously useful tool and that it can do wonders for your website. But consider that JavaScript behaves very differently on different platforms. As a matter of fact, it can provide very different performance even on the different models on the same phone. That is why it is very wise to keep JavaScript on the minimum and use it only when it’s absolutely necessary.
These were some of the tips that should help you rebuild your website as a sleek, mobile-friendly piece of eye-candy. Use them and you will make sure that your visitors will never hit the Home button tired of cluttered pages, confusing menus, and endless panning and zooming.
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