As more and more people use their cellular devices for web browsing, it’s imperative that businesses have a mobile-friendly website, or a mobile-friendly redirect.
Creating a mobile-friendly environment is easy when the content of a site is separate from its presentation. This is accomplished by using HTML and CSS style sheets. Style sheets can change the font-size and spacing, and frame widths to maximize the visible content on a tiny mobile screen.
The mobile web design industry is ever growing, with more and more people using smart phones and Wi-Fi enabled devices for local search. The problem isn’t with the phones, those have ever increasing thinking power. But users with iPods and kindles, and devices that could surf the web though they aren’t exactly designed for it, can suffer if the page their trying to load is too image intensive.
Mobile web design is an up and coming field of web development. It’s important for your web site and your content to always be visible. But there are so many different devices all with their own language (not always HTML) that it’s impossible to have a website for every single one. But what you can do is create compatibility for a majority of devices.
Many cell phones have proprietary web browsers, which may display your website differently than how you want, this is why you need to test run your site in the format being viewed. If the user has difficulty using your site on their device, (or even gets a “page too large to be displayed properly”) notice, then all the carefully researched impact of your website is lost.
For mobile web design, it’s more about ease of use and content readability than fancy presentation. As a matter of fact, many mobile devices can’t understand CSS, so the pretty goes away, and a mess appears on their screen.
An easy way to fix this without redoing your whole website is to create a mobile user redirect. This is a subset of your site, with core functionality that is specifically catered to the mobile device user. Remove the fancy CSS, and the javascript, and only keep what’s important.
The mobile web is all about speed and readability, keep your files small and simple. Once you’ve hooked the user with your content, they will want to view your site on their computer, and anything you had to leave out will be viewed later.