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Optimising a Website for Mobile – Part 1
Posted in: Blog by CodersCode on March 15, 2011
In this first part, we’ll be looking at how you make sure your site is serving the best
possible type of site by creating an optimised website for your mobile visitors.
Part 1: Creating a Mobile Site
Most new smartphones will view a ‘normal’ website anyway (unless it is built in Flash) so a mobile site is ultimately created to improve the user experience and performance from mobile phone using visitors.
Here are our five key considerations:
- Research: if you have analytics on your site, then you can find out what the performance is like for mobile visitors by splitting these out in the reports. See if their performance is noticeably worse than general visitors.
- Layout & Content: we’ve already covered why structure is crucial, but it is even more so for mobile sites. You need to strip out all ancillary content, try to reduce to one column, make sure the most important content is at the top of the page. Space is at an absolute premium – so use it well and wisely.
- Graphics: until 4G comes, pages will load more slowly on mobile devices, particularly when not on 3G but just GPRS. So optimise graphics as far as possible and only have one or two per page. Use colour to create effects rather than images.
- Coding: just keep it simple – stick to XML/HTML/CSS and avoid much use of Javascript or other more complicated languages.
- Linear: moving around a website is more like parking a car – back and forward gears rather than having many different options for next steps. So make it easy to go backwards and forwards in the page and make next steps obvious.
If you follow these steps, then you’re on you way to creating a very effective mobile website.