Today, cell phones and other mobile devices have become a daily necessity. They are taken for granted, part and parcel of everyday life. There is hardly a person who can get up from bed without checking their phone first. The change in the way viewers are accessing the internet has put pressure on businesses. Any person who owns a website must make it mobile friendly.
When companies fail to give their visitors a satisfying experience on mobile devices, they will lose on a massive chunk of traffic. Moreover, a website that is mobile-friendly gets better search engine ranking. In so many words, every organisation necessarily should have a site that is mobile friendly.
Knowing the value of something is one side of the coin, the other is actually implementing it. But creating a website that works on every machine is not possible for amateurs. An excellent ecommerce website development company is the best bet, yet it doesn’t imply that one shouldn’t be aware of the steps that can be taken to redesign a website for phones and tablets.
What Should Be Done
- Make it responsive
The very first step (and the most curial one) is to convert the site into being responsive. A responsive website is defined as the one that displays all the same data and content, no matter which gadget it is opened on. Additionally, it rearranges the information, images, and videos so that they fit perfectly to screen size. A website that is not responsive will not show the entire information present on the site when accessed through a small screen.
An added advantage is the preference Google gives to responsive web design sites which is excellent for SEO.
- Make it accessible.
When people access a site on the mobile, there is a high probability they require quick information. Very few consumers open a website on a smartphone to leisurely read and browse through it. This means that a mobile viewer will not spend the same time searching through a site like the one on a computer. For a business, it equates to designing an accessible website.
The site should present the most vital information on the very first page or give access to it in the most visible section. When content is not easy to find, the user will leave and jump to another site. One way to make website mobile friendly is to put the link to FAQs on the first page so that navigating to the actual tab through a mobile gadget is not hard.
- Add in the Viewport Meta Tag.
Any homepage that opens on a mobile at the same width as a PC will be hard to read for the users. To view and browse through the complete information, the viewer will need to scroll not only up and down but to and fro also. This makes the process awkward and cumbersome which will cause the user to drop the site and move to another.
A viewport meta tag is a simple method of controlling the width of a website no matter on which device it is opened. It automatically adjusts the breadth of the site based on the screen size on which it is reached. The tag has to be added to every HTML page of the website.
What Should Not Be Done
- Get rid of autocorrect.
By default, the autocorrect is on when filling forms. It is also switched on in mobile devices. So, when a user is filling a form or a questionnaire on your website via a smartphone, it will automatically correct names of the person and address. This can make the process of filling the form drawn-out and exasperating. Switching off the autocorrect will make the visitor’s interaction convenient. They will not have to scroll back and change the autocorrected words to the actual spelling.
- Remove flash.
Both iOS and Android phones and tablets do not support flash. Moreover, flash takes a lot of time load which slows the speed of a website page. In some extreme cases, flash fails to work on browsers and gadgets. Any website that still utilises flash will face one or all of these problems.
If your site has flash animation, a mobile user will not be able to access it. Thus, it is best to remove all flash elements from the website and design one that performs robustly even without it.