Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

More and more people are browsing the web with their mobile devices and smart phones every day. A mobile version of a website can provide several benefits, such as faster loading and making sure the content of the site can be viewed from a variety of devices. This trend is only increasing as smart phones bridge the gap between PC and handheld computing devices.

Designing a mobile version of a website is quite a bit different than designing a website for regular PC browsing. The most obvious of differences is the sheer screen size and resolutions to work with. Because of this, a lot of traditional web design techniques will not work.

Imagine being only able to see a 2.5 "x3" area of ​​your current website at any given time. It's impossible to see the whole site at once and yet have it still be legitimate. People end of scrolling through the site with their fingers and accidently clicking on links they do not mean to hit.

That is why more often than not, a designer must go all the way back to basics when designing a mobile site. Keep the color theme and content, and focus more on function buttons as graphical elements instead of pictures with taglines.

The main thing to remember when designing mobile versions of websites is to keep it simple and stick to essentials. The more complex you make it, the more you try to "fancy" it up, the worse it will turn out. Mobile sites are more about usability and functionality than visual pleasure.