Design with a small form factor in mindWhen viewed on most mobile devices, standard websites are cumbersome to navigate. Users must zoom in on the page in order to be able to read content or click on links and are forced to scroll around the site, viewing only small portions of each page at a time. This is both frustrating and inefficient. When creating a mobile website, always design with possible size constraints in mind. Current technologies like responsive frameworks make it easier than ever to ensure that your website looks its best on every device.
Show only your most important contentBecause mobile devices have smaller screens, even reading a few paragraphs of text can require quite a bit of scrolling. Edit your content until only the most crucial bits remain, and completely remove pages and sections not conducive to effective mobile browsing (such as large image galleries, image rotators and dense blogs). Your aim should be to provide your visitors with the essentials nothing more or less. After all, they can always visit your full web site (more on that later).
Optimize all of your web site's mediaAlthough mobile networks have steadily increased in speed since inception, they are still noticeably slower than the standard broadband internet used by most homes and businesses. Additionally, mobile users often have 'capped' data plans that restrict download speeds and charge additional fees after they have surpassed a certain level of usage. Because of these two points, it is crucial to optimize your business's mobile web site as much as possible. You can start with the following:
Remove Flash animations and Flash-based video files. Not only are they large files that will drastically increase your site's loading time, but most smartphone browsers do not support Flash at all.
Scale and compress all of your images. Be certain that all of your images are saved at the size in which they will be displayed - do not use a larger image and rely on the browser to scale it down. Also, keep the number of images per page to a bare minimum.
Make your navigation straightforward. The fewer clicks it takes for a visitor to reach the content they are after, the better.
Keep your page code lightweight. Needlessly dense stylesheets and complicated Javascript will only slow down your mobile site and make it more frustrating to use.
Make it easy to reach youOne of the most common reasons mobile users browse a company's web site is to get in touch with them. Make that process as simple as possible for your visitors: put a strong call-to-action and click-to-call button on your landing page. Make your contact form straightforward and easy to complete. The less time a prospect needs to spend hunting for your phone number or email address, the less likely they are to give up and look elsewhere.
Provide a way to view your full web siteAutomatic detection and redirection are great for showing customers and prospects information quickly and conveniently but you should never force your visitors to view your mobile site without providing a way for them to navigate back to your full site. Many smartphones now come with high-resolution screens that make browsing even a standard web site relatively painless. Also, many people do nearly all of their browsing from a mobile device, making it vital that they are able to access the content they are after without switching to a regular computer.
Don't forget to track your trafficBe certain that you install an analytics platform on your mobile web site, and check it often. This will allow you to see how many of your visitors are being automatically redirected to your mobile site, how many arrive there directly, and how many return to your full web site for additional information.
The bottom line: Your mobile web site is more than just a smaller version of your existing site. An effective mobile site represents an entirely different way of looking at things.