Advantages and Features of Mobile Website design – What You Need to Know
Thursday, December 22nd, 20112011 is being touted because the year when mobile technology really comes to the fore. What exactly are the characteristics, advantages and disadvantages of mobile we design? Which web development features re mobile friendly and which are not? Lastly and mostly importantly, how can you find out how mobile web design could work for the business?
Benefits of mobile website design
A well developed mobile website often means a heightened selection of web traffic to your web site, happy to have the ability to make use of your site to full effect and that it functions in the right way.
If your company targets people on the move (e.g. a restaurant or hotel), you will probably get business with good mobile web development.
Even in case your business is not a natural match mobile technology, giving considered to good mobile website design can present your organization as a professional, cutting edge outfit which embraces new technology.
Developing for mobiles can expand your brand and product away from website into apps and software packages. The options with mobile technology are growing each day.
Disadvantages of mobile website design
You need to know what you’re doing. If done right, there really should not be any disadvantages to using a mobile web designed site. However, there are some potential pitfalls that might annoy your mobile customers and have a detrimental effect on your research engine rankings for the web site in general.
Things are always changing. You can’t expect to fund your mobile web design and then leave it there. Mobile web technology keeps growing and expanding. When a new smartphone comes on the marketplace, you need to be prepared to grow and alter to satisfy the new demands.
It may not be right for your company. Just like any investment of time or money, you have to decide whether the ROI merits your time and effort you will put in. Businesses don’t all fit one mold, so you have to do your research before starting developing a mobile site to make sure that your expectations from the returns are met.
How to go about working on your mobile site – a few of the characteristics of mobile website design and development
1) Look at your stats
Before creating a mobile site, the first port of call is Google Analytics or similar, where you can identify causes of traffic to your website. Google Analytics informs you what quantity of the readers are using mobiles to gain access to your website and which specific devices people are using. This should help you decide whether it is worth allocating resources to creating a mobile web site for the business and which devices to make use of when testing your website design.
2) Create a mobile stylesheet
The easiest method to run a mobile site is to use a different CSS stylesheet towards the one you utilize for the browser pages. This method is preferable to any other because it avoids duplicating content within your site (which could damage your search engine rankings) and makes it easier to update your site in one fell swoop.
3) Avoid duplicating content
Google can penalize your website for having plenty of pages with the same content, if you plan to develop another group of webpages for mobile phones, ensure that the content is specifically not the same as that for your browser website. If you need a full reference of dos and don’ts from Google, Webmaster Tools is a great place to start:
4) Keep images low
You have to try to your lowest common denominator and you have no idea what connection speeds you are dealing with on smart phones. If you’re able to achieve this, sticking to several small images will give you a far more enjoyable experience for the customers visiting by telephone.
5) No Flash… end of
Flash isn’t a feature of web design which is considered mobile friendly. It doesn’t work on iPhones and because of security constraints, might be eliminated of many browsers later on, therefore it is best avoided in any case. Additionally, Flash can’t be read by search engines like google which means you will not be scoring points on Google or Bing. If you prefer a phone- and search-engine-friendly Flash look-alike, try jQuery? It works using JavaScript, that is available on most browsers and phones as well as your text can be read by search engines like google.
6) Apps
With respect to the nature of the business, you might wish to develop an app. An app is really a small program that is either free or can be bought (the typical price for an iPhone app is 0.80). Apps sit as icons on the iPhone or any other smartphone, so as well as providing a useful plan to your internet visitor, they’re an excellent ongoing advertisement for the website and business.