With the global revolution that has been created by the inception of mobile devices, a large group of business organizations is switching to mobile-friendly websites. Predictions have already been made about the worldwide mobile data traffic exploding by the year 2018. It will be interesting to see how the ever-growing count of mobile-friendly websites will affect the information and technology sector. If you’re about to design a website/web app for a mobile device then you’ve landed on the right post. Here, I’ll be offering you some random and easy-to-follow tips on designing remarkable websites that specially target iOS/Android mobile devices. With the surge of iOS and Android app design just about to begin, these tips would serve as your perfect guide in accomplishing a majority of mobile web design projects.
1. Doing a good research is truly beneficial
Before proceeding ahead with designing a mobile-compatible website, it is essential to examine the capabilities of all the popular mobile browsers. You need to compare the functioning and overall performance of mobile browsers. Get to know about the target audience of your competitors and the kind of mobile browsers they’re catering their website to. I recommend you to try out all the advanced layout techniques such as CSS effects, jQuery etc. for getting a clearer picture about the design that would best suit the yet-to-be-developed mobile website.
2. Keep the design as plain and simple as possible
There’s a popular saying “Minimalism rocks on Mobile”. By maintaining a clean and simple approach for mobile web design, you can easily hone the chances of accomplishing the project in the desired way. Backed by fewer tweaks and minor adjustments, a simple mobile design will pave your way towards successful completion of several mobile website development projects. Since a website serves as an amazing tool for conveying the role of a company, it is important to design it for all the small-screen devices including: smartphones, netbooks and many more. Here, you also need to ensure that a lot of graphics, videos, animations may actually hamper the website’s ability to load quickly and distract the user from the original message that is being conveyed by the site owner.
3. Using frameworks is an excellent decision
Although there is a huge population of web designers which still believes in reinventing the wheel when it comes to coding a mobile-compatible website, there are others who opt for ready-made frameworks. Here is a list of few well-tested frameworks that serve handy for designing mobile-ready websites and apps targeting iOS and Android devices:
Kitchen-sink framework
This is the one which collaborates layout system, jQuery plugins and UI elements, allowing you to develop a mobile-ready website within shortest amount of time. Some popular examples of this framework include Bootstrap and Foundation.
Mid-range framework
This is a framework that makes customizing mobile designs simpler for you. Some popular examples include: LESS Framework 4 and Skeleton.
UI Element Framework
This is the framework that is being designed for offering you an easy way of adding fancy, interface elements that can work wonders for creating a mobile-compatible application. Some popular examples include: KendoUI, Wijmo and jQuery Mobile.
4. Avoid including a lot of content
As someone who’s about to dive into the world of mobile website development, you need to make it a point not to include a lot of content into the design. Rather you must figure out an easy method of conveying your story via minimum number of words. Since the screen of a smartphone is quite small, including a large quantity of text within the mobile-ready website wouldn’t be a good option.
5. Make the search option readily available for the website visitors
Since search functionality is of prime importance when designing a website, it is necessary for you; as a designer to include the search option in a clear and well-presented manner. Make sure your visitors don’t have to search for the search field. They should be be able to access it readily, without getting into any sort of hassles.
Wrapping it all up
So that was a collage of mobile designing tips which would definitely aid you in delivering high-performing websites that can run flawlessly on any and every real mobile hardware. Hopefully, by now you’d have gathered the confidence of implementing complex mobile website design projects with a whole new amount of passion.
About The Author
Deepu Balan
Hi there! I’m a web UI/UX architect. This is my online playground, my beautiful space to share my passions, my work and what I find inspiring.