With more and more people accessing websites from their phones, your website must function just as well on mobile devices as it does on a desktop. Here are the essentials you need to know to create a website that is easily usable on both iPhones and Android phones.
Outsourcing Is Often the Best Option
Any website requires expert UX and UI design, but it’s even more crucial for mobile-friendly sites. User experience design encompasses all aspects of a user’s interaction with your website, while user interface design has more to do with your site’s look, feel, and presentation.
If you want your website to flourish, consider getting a professional UI/UX designer, like Clay, on board. The famous San Francisco design and branding agency Clay puts user experience at the heart of everything it does. And the firm began life focusing on mobile apps, so it is the perfect UX design company to hire.
You may even consider outsourcing all of your website development needs to a web design company. Small and medium-sized businesses can benefit from outsourcing as much as big businesses because it enables them to use technologies without having to build them from scratch.
Outsourcing also allows you to save costs in the long run and have access to larger pools of experts. Find out more about how to outsource web development for your mobile-friendly website.
Make Your Website Responsive
There are many more things that must be considered when creating a mobile-friendly website than for a website that can be accessed on desktops. A crucial element for a mobile-friendly site is responsiveness.
A responsive website contains all of the same content regardless of the type of device that’s used to access it, and it alters the way the content is displayed and arranged to suit the size of the device screen. Furthermore, a responsive design is great for Search Engine Optimization; it is Google’s preferred format for mobile websites.
Do Not Use Flash Animations
Using flash animations throughout your website is a bad idea, so don’t do it. Flash can slow down pages’ load times, it is bad for SEO, and it simply doesn’t work on many browsers and devices. Neither iOS or Android support flash.
Include the Viewport Meta Tag
Using the viewport meta tag is essential, as it is an easy way to control your site’s appearance on a mobile device. If your website page opens the same on a desktop and the small screen of a phone, mobile-site users will have a lot of difficulties scrolling from side to side to read each line of text and to view all the content. By using the viewport meta tag, you ensure that all browsers will fit the width of your website’s pages to the screen of the specific device being used.
Use Big Buttons
It’s easy to click on website buttons when accessing a site from a desktop. But trying to click on tiny buttons with your fingers on a small phone screen can be difficult, especially if multiple buttons are next to each other. Indeed, such designs can start to cause real frustration and irritability to your website visitors, and that is the last thing you want. The problem is solved easily, though. Use bigger buttons. And make sure those buttons are reasonably easy to use on all devices.
Use Large Fonts
Size matters. That doesn’t only apply to buttons. It also applies to fonts. Reading on small screens can be challenging, so it is always best to use a font size of at least 14px. It is also best to stick to standard fonts because unrecognized fonts can make it slower for your website to load on mobile devices.