Mobile Web Design: 5 Important Tips
Since Google’s search algorithm started favoring mobile-friendly sites back in April this year, optimizing your website for mobile devices became more important than ever.
As an Omaha web design company helping clients across several industries, the hottest topic is mobile web design.
If you’re up for an adventure in mobile web design, here are five of the most important tips you need to know.
Keep Your Design Simple
Don’t make a mistake in designing a website for desktop and then trying to condense it into a mobile version. This is common if you use an inexperienced web design firm. The most important feature of a good mobile-friendly site is its simplicity.
Strip down the unnecessary parts and find a good balance between navigation and content. Your goal should be to get your users where they want to be as fast as possible, with minimum effort required.
Choose Your Fonts Carefully
Tiny screens are not exactly suited for small text. If you want to catch the visitor’s eye, make your fonts as comfortable as possible. This not only means keeping them big and bold, but also making them simple to read by avoiding cursive and similar fancy fonts.
Take care of the contrast between the background and the font by choosing the right color scheme – experience has shown most users prefer vibrant colors.
Keep It Linear
Make it easy for your visitors to get anywhere on the site by keeping the navigation as logical as possible. Three levels of navigation should be deep enough for most sites – any more than that, and the users will start getting disoriented.
The navigation menu should be positioned below the page content in order to change pages as fast as possible. Also, try to get the headline out of the way of page content by making it the first thing your audience will see.
Avoid Tiny Buttons
Placing your buttons too close together will all but ensure your visitors press the wrong one by accident. There are rules for proper size of buttons and the spacing between them that you should try to follow whenever possible.
The buttons should be at least 50px by 50px with about 20px to 32px of space between them. Remember to design for fingers and you’ll be fine.
Keep Load Times Fast
For a mobile website, speed is absolutely paramount – if your loading times are too slow, the users will quickly tune out and go somewhere else. This may sound expensive but it is not. This should be included in any affordable web design package.
Optimize your images for maximum compression and avoid complex widgets unless they’re crucial to the site.
High-resolution video galleries and similar embedded media may be a good fit for desktop computers, but here they’ll just have a negative impact on your site’s web ranking.
Professional web design companies will make sure you are getting a mobile responsive version of your website as it is being built. Be careful of freelance web design that creates them independent of each other.