With more and more people accessing internet from devices like smartphones and other mobile devices, the need of making a mobile friendly site designs has become mandatory for businesses operating online. Hence it is no more a secret now that mobile browsing will soon be going to replace the traditional browsing of web from PCs and laptops.
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When it comes to designing websites for mobile devices, the site layouts should be able to accommodate elements of comfort and ease in the site navigations for the mobile users. However, people designing the mobile websites tend to make a couple of mistakes mostly due to their ignorance or lack of experience and exposure in this field. Their mistakes simply make the site designs hostile to the small screens of mobile and tablet screens. So, when it comes to designing, you need to keep in mind these mistakes and avoid doing the following things for your site for its mobile version. Let’s check these things out.
Considering too much of text
When it comes to designing a mobile friendly website, you should always keep one thing in your mind that your site would be seen over mobile devices and it shouldn’t appear cramped with text. When your site appearance seems to be bombarded with too many words, the mobile users would find it very much difficult to read the text and your entire site would look crazy for these people. This is the most common mistakes people make in the mobile site designing projects. It is recommended to learn a couple of techniques like using bullets or coming out with small and simple word lengths. So, while designing the site for mobile platforms, make sure the text you use over it should be small in size so that it doesn’t look cluttered.
Clickable links or icons located too close to each other
A number of smartphones and mobile devices especially the ones coming from Apple or the Android products use physical touch screens for controlling and navigating different functions and web browsing things. At such cases, the fingers (especially the thumb) of the users become the tool for navigation and control. People designing websites for mobile devices tend to forget doing this. They do not consider the users’ fingers while designing the mobile site layouts thus their designs simply do not support their finger control. The number of clickable targets or objects usually has 30 to 40 pixel size, which are very easy for the touch screen users, while the links and icons shouldn’t be set too close to each other. You need a minimum separation of 10-20 pixels in your mobile site designs, which people tend to forget.
Ignoring the device screen size
Cooking food for one and doing the same for ten people are two different things. Though the basic technique you use would be the same, however, the amounts of stuff required for ten people would be inevitably more than one. Similar is the case of site designing for desktops and mobile devices. You need to consider the device screen size while designing the mobile friendly sites. If you are targeting for iPhone 4 or 4S devices, use a site design layout, which can fit in between 3.5 inches and 690×460 screens. In this way, you need to consider the mobile device size first rather than doing things in a random fashion.
The slow load times
The mobile users do not have time or patience to bear the slow loading speed sites unlike you have while accessing them over the desktop computers. Hence while designing mobile friendly sites, putting heavy image files or some big size background image, which consumes time to load, should be avoided. By avoiding this, you can maximize the readability in some specific lighting conditions. If pictures and icons are seen there, you could choose to blend them in one file simply to reduce the HTTP requests and using the CSS just to position these things in a neat manner.
Ignoring the user data input method optimization
Many people while putting the forms over the mobile sites forget the mobile platforms and carry out the things in the same old formats by putting more amounts of data in these things. However, you are supposed to include only the important fields over the user data input. You are supposed to consider a number of radio buttons or the check boxes with the corresponding options simply to avoid the need for the users to the type options. Also, you need to use the ability to save the user cache data, which help the users to avoid putting the same old information that they did the last time.
Final word
If you are able to avoid doing these things while designing any mobile friendly designs, your sites are more likely to be visited by the mobile users. As the amount of people accessing web is on a constant rise both for the personal and business use, hence coming out with a mobile site designs have become mandatory. You cannot ignore them.
About The Author: Claudia is a writer/blogger. She loves writing, travelling and reading books. She contributes to Hydroxycut.
