How To Design A Mobile-Friendly Website In Los Angeles?
8 Tips For You While Building A Mobile-Friendly Website
93% of Internet users browse the Internet on a mobile device every day. That’s 3.5 billion people who could be viewing your website on their phones or tablets at any given time.It follows, then, that you should work as hard as you can to optimize your online presence for mobile devices. There is nothing worse than having a completely ineffective marketing funnel on non-desktop devices.To give you some guidance, we have put together 8 mobile design best practices that you should follow. They will help you optimize the user experience of your visitors, maximizing the impact of your marketing funnel for any device.
- Get rid of your navigation bar
On mobile devices, real estate is very important. This means that you need to maximize what you get from your website on mobile devices.An easy way to do this is not to place your navigation bar on the mobile device.On a laptop or desktop, your navigation bar can be incredibly useful – it’s a simple way for your visitors to navigate the pages of your site, making it easy for them to find exactly what they’re looking for.But on mobile, your navigation bar can take up a ton of space that could otherwise be used for text, images, or whatever other content you have on your website or landing pages.
Now, you may be wondering how visitors are expected to navigate your site without a navigation bar. There are a few ways around this…The most popular way is to incorporate a hamburger menu, which allows you to create a much smaller (but still branded) top bar. The hamburger menu acts as a drawer, coming out of the left side of the screen to display the various menu items in the navigation bar.
Or, depending on the size of your web pages, you can choose to create a single page layout for mobile devices.However, unless your website is relatively sparse in content, this is probably not the best option for your business.
- Keep important items within reach
Think about how you hold your phone. If you’re like the majority of people, you only use one of your thumbs to interact with your mobile screen.
You’re not alone – according to a recent study by a mobile UX expert, 75% of people only use a thumb to interact too.
The way we hold our phones has changed. This is because, though the phones have become bigger, the size of our hands is still the same. Thus, the “hot spots” on the screen have shifted, and touch accuracy decreases as we get closer to the outer edges of the screen.
As a result, we as designers need to organize content in a way that puts primary interactions front and center, leaving secondary and tertiary functions to the top and bottom edges of the screen. The position of these functions is directly related to the ease of access for a user.
Primary features are in the area that users can easily access with their thumbs, while tertiary (and to some extent secondary) features are in less precise areas and require a bit more work to reach.
- Optimize and minimize file size
You probably already know how important it is to optimize the size of the images on your website. They drastically affect load time, which has a cascading effect on both the user experience and the search ranking of your pages.
This is doubly important on mobile. Not only are connections less reliable on mobile, but mobile users don’t like to wait. That means if your page doesn’t load quickly, they probably won’t stick around to let it finish.
- Keep content short
Less is absolutely more when it comes to mobile web design. Maintain brevity and focus in your content. Mobile users are often looking for specific information and don’t want to have to read a lot of text to find it.
If you must include lengthier bits of text, use short paragraphs, clear headings, and bulleted lists to make them easier to skim. Also, be careful not to overload your pages with too many images or videos. Stick to the essentials and make sure your page loads quickly.
- Improve the speed of your website
When developing a mobile-friendly website, speed is one of the most crucial factors to consider. Mobile users are constantly on the move and require quick access to information. If your pages take too long to load, they are likely to move to another site.There are a few things you can do to improve your website speed, including optimizing your images and using a content delivery network (CDN). Also, make sure that your server is configured correctly and that you are not using any unnecessary plugins or scripts.
By improving the speed of your website, you can ensure that mobile users have a positive experience when visiting your site.
- Avoid using too much Javascript
While JavaScript might increase the functionality of your website, it can also cause your pages to load slowly.
Mobile devices often have slower processors than desktop computers, so they can have a hard time loading pages with a lot of JavaScript.
- Disable pop-ups
In 2017, Google implemented its penalty for what it calls “intrusive interstitials” . In layman’s terms, this means popups.
Basically, displaying pop-ups on your web pages on mobile devices detracts from the user experience, as visitors can’t access or view the content they’ve clicked to find.
To combat this, Google is penalizing popup pages by lowering their search ranking, to discourage people from adding popups to their sites. The simple solution? Disable pop-ups on mobile.
- Design for responsiveness
If you were around during the advent and rise of the mobile web, you may remember that most websites actually created completely new mobile-friendly designs that would work for the smaller screens of the pre-iPhone era.
These pages often featured minimal images and relatively heavy text to combat the slow browsing speeds mobile users experienced on their networks other than 3G, LTE, and WiFi.
Fast forward about ten years, and the mobile landscape has completely changed. Screens are huge, Internet connections have sped up, and tablets exist.
These advances (and other advances in front-end design languages like CSS) paved the way for adaptive and responsive design.
Although there are nuances between these two types of design, their main purpose remains the same: to create a unique website design that is responsive and dynamically changes based on the device each visitor is using.
There are a few things to keep in mind when considering responsiveness:
- Image sizes –
If images are important to your page content, make sure they are clearly visible on mobile devices. Images that are 50% wide on the desktop can also be displayed at 50% on mobile, and that’s too small.
- Content Layout/Order-
Depending on how you arrange elements on your desktop page, your content may be awkwardly arranged when you switch to mobile devices. Double-check to make sure all content is in order, even on other devices.
- Animations –
Animations that look good on a desktop may not work well on mobile. Please check them on your phone before publishing your page to make sure they are acceptable.
- Video –
Keeping in mind file size recommendations, consider hiding (or removing) video on mobile devices. It’s big, heavy, and can drastically slow down your mobile experience.
Need help with website design? As more and more people use their phones to search the internet, it’s more important than ever to have a modern, professional website that’s mobile-friendly.
This is exactly what you will have if you get your website built through web design company Small Biz Web Design Studio.
At Small Biz Web Design Studio all of our websites are designed and developed to be compatible with mobile users and devices. If you want to learn more, call us for a consultation.
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How To Design A Mobile-Friendly Website In Los Angeles – Small Biz Web Design Studio
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