Tips for Simplifying Your Mobile Site
When designing a mobile website for your business, you may want to consider closely adhering to the phrase "less is more." Creating a mobile website for your retail store, whether it's a brick-and-mortar storefront or e-commerce site, can be a great way to tap into the massive mobile market and help your business access many prospects via their mobile devices.
Though you may assume that providing a lot of information and large graphics will make your site more noticeable, and this may be true of a regular website, it's the opposite with mobile sites. Since the screen on smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices is considerably smaller, it's important that you adapt your website to be more accessible on small devices.
Text and Image Size
As a retailer, the images you present and descriptive text is of utmost importance. Although you may be tempted to include as much information as you can, you should be careful not to overwhelm consumers or clutter the screen on their phone. Information presented on a mobile device must be streamlined in a clear, simplified manner. Consider the following tips:
- When a smartphone accesses a website that's not mobile optimized, the website appears as a much smaller version of itself. Building a mobile-optimized site using larger-sized text will make your site easier to read on the small screen of a smartphone. Also take into account the amount of space larger text will fill up, so use shortened phrases and link lengthy descriptions to their own pages.
- Setting the size of images to be used on a mobile site can be a tricky process. Images with too low of a dpi (dots per inch) will appear in low resolution and look pixelated. However, using large image sizes like those on desktop websites can take a long time to load.
Eliminate Flash, Java
If you're looking to build a truly dynamic retail mobile site, you may want to approach it as you would your online site with Flash and Java. However, Apple's mobile devices do not support Flash, Java, frames, pop-ups and other similar elements. Though Flash is now being used in mobile applications, sites accessed through a browser still cannot display any sort of animation with Flash.
HTML5 is commonly thought of as the only suggested substitute for Flash, and it continues to catch up in terms of compatibility.
Formatting for Mobile Sites
You want your customers to have the best viewing experience when shopping on your mobile site, so consider the screen shape on a smartphone, rectangular and long, quite the opposite of a computer screen. Don't rely on your customer to turn their phone sideways, rather adapt your website to better fit the space available.
- Scale down the number of columns to one or two, and make sure they aren't separated with too much space in between that will force the user to scroll sideways multiple times. Consider gallery style layout.
- Make the navigation links on your site simple and present at all times. These should be located at the top of the page, and as simple as possible.
Consumers like things to be simple and accessible on their mobile devices, making it easier to multitask and access information while on the go. Streamlining your retail site to work efficiently on mobile devices will help you to expand you customer base in the mobile market.
Kate Webster writes for ResourceNation.com, a lead generation company.