Principles of Mobile-Friendly Web Design
How can you ensure your website is mobile-friendly? Here are some principles to follow.
As you know, the rise of smartphones has changed how society runs. This is just as true of our personal lives as it is our professional lives. From a digital marketing perspective, we ought to keep in mind just how much of our traffic comes from these devices. Since 2017, roughly 50% of internet traffic has originated from smartphones. Your business’ website has to be mobile-friendly to accommodate this growing percentage of mobile web browsers. Here are some principles of mobile-friendly web design to keep in mind.
Simplicity
If there’s one word to keep in mind when it comes to mobile-friendly web design, it should be ‘simplicity.’ When you’re viewing a website on a tiny screen, few things can be more detrimental to user experience than clutter. Cut down on bells and whistles. If your site isn’t easy to navigate from a mobile device, you might be losing potential customers.
Keep Important Information Up Front
A majority of visitors to your website are probably just seeking basic information. This is especially true when they visit your site from a mobile device, as they may be on the go and short on time. For this reason, you should keep all the most essential information—store hours, location, phone number, or whatever else you want them to know—up front and clear as can be.
Not sure what information qualifies as ‘important’? Think about the kinds of phone calls you receive. If there are a few questions that get asked all the time, then the answer probably has to be clearer and easier to find on your mobile site.
Use Icons
Another one of the challenges of mobile web browsing is how difficult it can be to tap what you want. Especially on text-heavy pages, such as blogs, it can be frustrating to click hyperlinked words on a mobile device. For this reason, make heavy use of tappable icons. Call to action buttons are a hallmark of excellent conversion in mobile-friendly web design. Use them.
Minimize Forms
Navigating the web while mobile is difficult enough, but filling out forms is even harder. With this in mind, you should try to cut out all but the most essential and simplified of forms from your mobile site. As much as possible, you want visitors to your site to be able to navigate with only one thumb. The more they have to type, the less pleasant of an experience they will have.
Test It!
This should go without saying, but you should test your design on a mobile device. And not just your device, either. As much as you can, try out the mobile site across a wide variety of devices and operating systems, as these changes could impact how things are displayed.
Consider having an outsider test it, too. It’s easy to think a website is navigable if you designed it yourself, or if a colleague was the architect. An outsider—ideally, a few—will be able to tell you frankly if navigation is truly intuitive.
Contact Adventure Web Interactive Today
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