With Google's Mobilegeddon update, mobile websites are more important than ever. If your website isn't mobile-friendly, then you will find that it will start falling in the search results starting today. If you want to find out more about that... check out our previous article. So let's look at what you need to do to get your site optimized for mobile.
What does it mean to be "mobile-friendly"...?
Mobile optimization is the process of optimizing your website to looks more awesome on mobile devices like phones and tablets. This can be done in several different ways, but the way that our geeks (and Google) recommends is a technique called Responsive Design. That's just a fancy way of saying that the part of the website will flow to fit any size screen.
What's wrong with your mobile site?
There are a few main things that you want to keep in mind with a mobile website...
- Page load speed.
- Load time is really important since smaller devices have lower speed connections and device hardware just isn't as fast as a desktop. - Viewport should be only as wide as the phone.
- Those sites that you have to pinch and zoom and scroll right and left to see all of the content. That means the viewport is too wide. - Flash is bad.
- If you want special effects they're gonna have to be in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. - Pop-ups are bad.
- Popups are always bad, but on mobile they are really bad. - Design for the fat finger.
- Make buttons the right size so as to eliminate fat finger taps and mis-taps.