Mobile Visitors and More…
Prepare for the Mobile Onslaught
So, when you built your website what visitors platforms did you consider? Did you confine your scope to browsers, OSes, or go even further and consider devices? Many businesses seek PC and Mac compatibility as well support for the big browsers. We think about Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer. We consider Safari and maybe even Opera. The changing landscape of Internet access and use is changing the options rapidly. From tablets to smartphones the Internet audience is changing.
While many devices now have the power and resolution to render our PC optimized sites, usability usually suffers. So is a proper render good enough? Often it is not. Users of mobile devices can find it very difficult to read your content and navigate your menus. Often these devices have highly volatile connection speeds. One minute cruising faster than broadband, crawling slower than dial-up the next. How do account for these conditions.
2 Major Considerations
First let’s discuss render. By render I am referring to the display of your site. The User Interface. How does it look on the mobile device. Often it looks as good as it does on a laptop or PC. This is usually where the similarities end. Navigation becomes very small and difficult to use. Fat fingers have difficulty with small screens even before your miniscule nav menu got in the way. That beautiful Flash banner you built has lost its impact (especially on iOS/Apple devices that don’t have Flash). You content is tiny and impossible to read. Sure, you can ‘zoom’ and ‘pan’ with these browsers, but that is far from ideal for reading and making an impact.
What you need is a mobile format. A simplified interface that is designed for small screens from the beginning. You don’t want to maintain content for two sites though (or maybe you do). New technologies allow you to provide the same content but re-render for the browsers device. In other words, if I am visiting from my laptop I see your site as it was designed for a PC, if I am using a smartphone I see your site as it was designed for a mobile device. Same page, different look. For instance, WordPress (a popular Content Management System for websites) allows you to install plugins that can detect the target device and serve the site using a different style sheet of format. Content is created once, but displayed dynamically.
Usually these mobile targeted website displays use screen-wide navigation buttons (vertically stacked), dynamically reduced image resolution and single column content layouts. The content developers do not have to create multiple versions of their work since the system uses certain assumptions about the content to redisplay it for the targeted device. Sure, there are some compromises, but as devices gain more capability these become less of a concern.
Speed Fluctuations. So we have discussed correcting the display and UI of a website to fit the visiting website. This, however, may not be enough. Mobile devices are often subject to dramatic connection speed fluctuations. While they are often capable of speeds similar to home broadband, their wireless nature makes the subject to weak signals and interference. These can cause your reliable connection speed to become slower than old dial-up connections. We handle this by making sure the site is high performance and lightweight.
Often a websites Content Management System can dynamically alter content layout to reduce size and improve performance. You as a website owner should determine if this is the case with your website. How light or heavy is your website. Are you using device appropriate images. Are you using simplified browser-side functionality? Anything you can do to reduce page load will be appreciated by your visitors.
Be Proactive
By taking a more informed interest in the design and capabilities of your website, you can ensure that you are prepared for the rising number of mobile users (possibly reaching 10% in 2013). Can you afford to ignore 10% of your market? Didn’t think so.