In today’s edition of Tips from the Experts, we asked four business professionals to share their top five tips for optimising your website for mobile and tablet consumers.
Matt James, Search and Conversion Executive at EMS-Internet
Around 50% of your customers will use mobile devices to access your website. If they find it difficult, they will quickly click away to a site that’s easier to use. It is therefore vital that you make their mobile and tablet experience a really good one.
1. Mobile First
Think mobile first. The website needs to be responsive so that it works well on any device, from a phone to a large TV screen. Having a mobile optimised site is now essential for any new website being designed.
2. Performance
Think about site speed and optimising images, JavaScript and CSS. The site needs to work on 3/4G as well as Wi-Fi. This is even more important for e-commerce sites.
3. Tasks and Goals
Ensure mobile and tablet visitors can do what they need to do on your website. Having a responsive site means that all content and functionality is available for all users.
By filtering analytics data to display mobile and tablet user behaviour, you’ll be able to see:
- How visitors find your site
- Which pages they look at
- How long they spend on the site
- Whether they are converting, and much more
4. Convenience
Remember that mobile devices are convenient and impulsive, and the best device is the nearest device. People will visit a different website rather than use a different device. It’s impressive when a website can make use of the phone’s location services to show things like a map, directions, or display the nearest stores, whether on the move or on the couch. It will be these sites that attract the most business.
5. Test
Remember to test your website on real devices in real circumstances. Think about orientation, touch areas, contrast, typography and layout. Getting these things right from the beginning can be the difference between consumers using your site or your competitor’s.
Anthony Karbian, Founder and CEO of bOnline
With mobile and tablet browsing projected to surpass desktop in 2014, the need for websites to offer seamless experiences for customers across all devices continues to grow.
1. Layout
Optimise your site for vertical scrolling of mobile devices. Make sure you can see the vital information such as phone numbers, name of the business, email addresses and navigation. Hide non-essential elements, especially for smaller screens.
2. Focus on Content
Considering the limited screen size of mobile devices, optimising your website to make crucial content easily accessible is essential. The key is to prioritise and organise content to give primary content precedence in the responsive design.
3. Navigation – Simple User Experience
A crucial part of your design is considering the navigation; it has to be easy to find and user-friendly as well – minimise graphics and focus on important topics. For mobile and tablets this means adapting the navigation to work on multiple devices and for touch.
4. Images – Resize for Screen Resolution
Images will be resized or removed as the device screen changes (smaller or larger), so avoid complex imagery and image based headers where possible. Make sure images are as clear as you can get them with the smallest size in pixels so that they don’t load too slowly.
5. Keep it Simple
Build your site so that it can load and function quickly. Keep your HTML clean and simple and don’t rely too much on special effects for critical parts of your website. Most of all, avoid web technologies that don’t work on mobile, such as flash media.
Rob Pollard, Managing Director at Lightbox
1. Hire a Digital Agency
It sounds simple, but hiring a good digital agency will save you time and money in the long run and will provide a significant return on investment. Do your research and choose an agency with a strong track record of building websites that are optimised for mobiles and tablets and, more importantly, look good.
2. Put Your Customers at the Forefront of Your Design
Always put the end user experience at the forefront of what you are doing. Create a strong visual, media rich and engaging layout to keep your visitors interested and more importantly give them a reason to return.
3. Create a Responsive Website
Websites have to have a fluid, engaging yet simple layout to adapt and change to suit different browsing devices. Keep the content and images simple and stylish.
4. Design with Mobile in Mind from the Outset
These days, most users browse using their phones and tablets more than their desktops, so designing websites for desktop and trying to make them work for mobile is a weak approach. Always check websites on your phone first before going live.
5. Keep the Website Code Lean and Clean
Responsive websites are complex. Well-structured code is an absolute necessity. Ask your digital agency about their web development coding and request your site’s code to be lean and tidy.
Jason Gaved, Managing Director of Mobile Website and App Developer at Lexel
1. Make Sure Your Website is Resizable
A really common mistake people make is to not properly re-size their website to fit a mobile phone or tablet without altering the look and feel of the site. If it isn’t in the right proportions for portable devices, the website might lose its functionality and discourage users.
2. Easy Navigation
You must have a menu that is collapsible and is easy to use on mobiles and tablets. Too many websites use clunky navigations. The menu should be easy to read and the text should be a suitable size for the mobile phone.
3. Optimise the Webpage
Think about why people would be using your website on their mobile. They’re likely to be on the go and if so, they’re going to want the pages to load quickly. Most of the time people on mobiles will be using 3G, so the page needs to load in less than 1-2 seconds. If it isn’t, you’ve got some optimising to do.
4. Utilise “tel”
Think about what you can gain as a business from making your site accessible to people on the go, and how you can use mobile functions to their full advantage. It’s a lot easier to get someone to call your business as they are already on a mobile. You should utilise the “tel:” HTML tags so that people can click on a number and call directly from their mobile.
5. Don’t Use Flash
If you can avoid using flash, java or a fancy slider, then do so. Minimise any effects you usually use on the main site, as they don’t work as well on a portable device. Remember that a mobile phone’s processing power is not as much as a desktop computer and a lot of scripts or software will easily clog up the CPU and memory.
Thanks to all our contributors for their valuable advice. Do you have any tips on how to best optimise your a website for mobile and tablet consumers? Feel free to leave a comment in the section below.