Optimizing Website for Mobile Viewing

Internet has been taken into smart phones already. The statistics say that 15% of the internet users are browsing through high-end mobile phones and around 25% of the internet usage has been observed from moderate smart phones. So recently we’ve seen the growth of eCommerce optimized for mobile phones to allow customers shop right from their mobile phone. This shows the growth and necessity for a business or a individual to optimize the websites for mobile viewing.

Websites or blogs that are optimized for mobiles won’t loose the 15-25% of incoming traffic. It is more beneficial when talked about business websites. Optimizing a website for different resolutions and mini-platforms need a optimization of code of the website. To do this, we have two options,
  1. Setup a mobile redirect
  2. Use mobile CSS

Setting up a mobile redirect

Mobile redirect will redirect your website to a mobile version when detected a low-end browser. This is done by adding up the viewport in the <head> section of your website.

You can also design a separate website for mobile version and provide a link at the top of the website saying “Mobile version available” here. When clicked it will redirect the website to mobile version. This is a bit old fashioned method that many of the webmasters opted out to implement as it is time taking and less flexible. It is the fact that a mobile version cannot have the same features a web version had.

Using Mobile CSS

In addition to the redirection option, you can also optimize CSS to make your website mobile-friendly. A way to do this is designing a responsive web template that accommodates itself with the resolution of the screen and the device. Unlike the normal websites, responsive websites need not to be scrolled horizontally to check out the contents on the page when viewing on mobile. Making a web template responsive is easy. Learning responsive design won’t take your half-an-hour of time at least if you had any previous knowledge of CSS.

webversion

mobile-firendly-ipad

mobile-fiendly-iphone4s

Before you proceed with either of these options, you should weed out some of the less important information that is on your actual website and tailor it toward mobile viewers. Mobile visitors are typically looking for key information when they visit your website, so reduce the information included on your web pages to provide them with just information that will be most useful. For example, make contact information prominently visible and make the navigation less robust.

While your entire website should be mobile friendly, there are some critical elements that you need to pay attention to. They are:
  1. Emails.
  2. Calls-to-action & landing pages.
  3. Downloads.
  4. Videos.
With indications that mobile bandwidth cost may be on the rise, it is important for marketers to develop lightweight ways to engage mobile users. Don’t ask a user to stream a ten-minute video. Instead, provide a clean text summary of the video if they are using a cellular data connection. Give them an opportunity to watch the video if they are on a Wi-Fi connection, in an effort to help them conserve mobile bandwidth.

User HTML5 embed tag in embedding a video on the webpage. HTML 5 technology provides a great support for web playing of videos irrespective of the device and browser.

0/Post a reply/Replies

Previous Post Next Post