Five Tips for Making Your Website Mobile Friendly
Let’s face it. Mobile technology has taken over our lives and studies have shown that people are becoming more addicted to their Smartphones than ever before. We live in a multi-screen world where people are constantly shifting between their big screen televisions or monitors and the small screen afforded to them on a Smartphone. This shift has posed a new challenge to marketers as the consumer demands increase for businesses to make their websites easy to navigate both on a regular desktop computer, on a tablet and on a Smartphone.
Mobile friendly websitesare easy to identify. They often times have the same information and the same characteristics as a regular website, but are easier to navigate on a smaller phone. As your small business decides to enhance your customer experience, one of the first changes you must consider is to make your website mobile device friendly. Here are a few tips to get you started.
- Create a responsive design – Website design has become more intelligent and now, through a specialized code, websites can be designed to respond to the constraints of a website visitor’s device. This means, that as soon as a visitor accesses your website from a Smartphone, the website code will recognize that the person’s device cannot see the design as easily and will automatically respond to this by sending them to a mobile website. This happens in the background so the website visitor is never burdened with having to type a m. Before your domain name or navigate to a mobile website on their own.
- Create a website that is fast – Mobile devices do not load images and content as quickly. Testing your website frequently to see how fast your pages are loading is a good way to see what your customers are experiencing when they try to visit your website on the go. Focusing your efforts on fast load times will make your website more mobile friendly and make it easier for your visitors to get the information they need without having to wait too long.
- Put the basics at the top – Your website may not need a complete overhaul, or it may not be possible to totally rebuild your website design just to make it mobile friendly. In this case, focus on putting the basic information up top. This is the content that will load first and fastest so your customer can get what they need right away. Basics include your name, contact information, hours of operation and a few sentences about what you do.
- Avoid flash based videos on your home page – Flash videos are unable to be viewed on a large number of devices and instead will only be displayed as a gray box that will probably take too long to load. To overcome this, avoid putting flash videos on your home page and instead link to them. Your customers that are data conscious will appreciate not having as much information to download just to access your website and your page will run faster.
- Keep navigation menus straightforward – Your website should already be designed with easy navigation, and this should be no different from the mobile version of your website. Keep the navigation menus straightforward and easy to understand while you set up the mobile version of your site. This will help keep your customer on your website for longer, regardless of which device they access it from.
Not having a mobile website is no longer an option for small businesses that want to be competitive. Contact the team here atInfintech Designs booth for help with your existing website and with changing over to a more mobile-friendly design.
