Retaining your readers with Mobile Web Design Best Practices

Mobile web design best practices and all the things surrounding them, is a subject that has been a hot point of contention since smart phones came to fruition. The question is, how important is it? From everything I can see data wise, the answer is very. Over 80% of people in the world own smart phones, probably more in the U.S. So this means a LARGE percentage of your customers are going to be looking at your site on a phone. There’s no other way to cut it, so to speak. Adhering to mobile guidelines that allow your site to operate more smoothly on all types of phones also help your SEO, as Google sees it as a “judging” factor. If your website serves ALL cellphones, you’re probably a pretty good site right?

A NON-Responsive Website (NOT Using Mobile Web Design Best Practices)

To show mobile web design best practices, lets show you the worst. You don’t want viewers to have to “trick” your page into working, websites usually look like this:

Doesn’t this website look like a poster?

What if your browser could detect you were on the phone, break the document into smaller pieces, adjust the font, etc. so that it’s all readable like this?

See how the layout of the page “breaks down” and the text increases in site, to accommodate the smaller view-port? This is mobile web design best practices.

Marketing Benefits of Mobile Responsivity in 2018

How is mobile responsivity implemented? There are a number of ways in which to do so, the prevailing method right now is through CSS Media Queries, which basically allow the developer to define 2 (or many more) separate settings based on how wide the page is.

Therefore, if I have a media query that dictates that any page below 960px in width will have it’s text green, that’s possible. These live in conditional statements that allow you to have a living document rather than a static flyer of a website. This shows effort and dynamicism in your design on the web, exactly what Google wants to respect you: time and effort into making your website better every day.

If you’d like to talk to me about the merits of responsive web design, and how it can be achieved in 2018 and on most efficiently and beautifully, please contact me!