If you are coming to us from 2014, it is more likely that your online visitors are coming to you from a desktop computer. In the likely event that your two feet are firmly planted in the year 2016, a majority of your website’s traffic will be coming to you from a mobile device. This means that it is more important than ever that your mobile web design is functional and efficient. If an online user visits your website from their phone, and they find your website cumbersome to use from their phone, they’ll abandon it.
In fact, it is so important that you have a functional mobile web design that Google announced that the mobile-usability is one of the factors it uses to rank websites in their search results now. Most of your traffic is going to come from a search engine, so creating a user-friendly mobile web design is a very important factor in search engine optimization.
To help you create the best possible mobile web design, we’ve put together a few simple, actionable tips:
Four Simple Mobile Web Design Ideas
- Keep It Simple, Stupid
People who visit your website from their phone are in a hurry. They want to get in, achieve the purpose of their visit, and get out. The don’t want to have to hunt through a bunch of clutter on your website from their tiny touch screen to find what they need. In fact, if your website overwhelms them when they open it up, they are likely to leave and go to the next link that Google suggests. The number of users who open your page and then leave without looking at anything is called your “bounce rate.” If your bounce rate is high, it tells Google that they shouldn’t recommend your page to their users, and messes up your search engine optimization ranking.
Keep the content on your mobile page simple and easy to navigate. Each page should have one purpose, and that purpose should be very obvious. Your users shouldn’t have to search to find they content they want from your page. - Make Sure Your Menus and Navigation are Intuitive
To repeat ourselves, you want your users to be able to easily find what they’re looking for. If it takes more than a few seconds and more than two or three clicks to get to what they want, they probably aren’t going to stick around and find it. Use accordion menus that disappear (to avoid eye clutter) with your content navigation. Avoid sub-menu upon sub-menu to get to any particular landing page. Make sure that the key takeaways of your website can be accessed within a click or two and with only a few seconds of exploring. - Your Mobile Website MUST Be Responsive
Mobile devices come in all shapes and sizes. Some are 176 pixels wide. Others are 240. Some are up to 600 pixels wide. If you design your website for only one pixel size, it will look great on some devices, and then funky on every other sized device. You cannot control the size of the device that is looking at your website, but you can control how your website fluctuates to ensure that it is still efficient and beautiful. Creating a responsive website means that if your user is coming to you from a desktop, a teeny phone screen, or a tablet, your website responds with a site that’s perfect for it. - Make Your Website Usable for All Sized Hands
If your website had forms a few years ago, it was most likely going to be accessed with a mouse and cursor, and it was find if entering data required precision. Now, a modern web design must be designed for tiny touch screens. All mobile users will be navigating with a touch screen. Some of them will have tiny fingers, some of them will have large and clumsy fingers. You have to make sure that there are no overlapping entry points on your forms; when your user tries to click one drop down menu and keeps hitting a radio button next to it, it’s very irritating. Your mobile website needs to be very intentional about how touch works, so that fingers of all shapes and sizes can use it.
Do you have any other tips? Please share below!