Why Mobile Optimization Is Important – And How To Do It

Walk into a coffee shop and observe your surroundings. In the rush of our busy lives, it has become the norm to check social media, visit web pages, and perform web searches, on-the-go, using either a smartphone or tablet. Most people have their phones handy at all times. Imagine searching for a new restaurant or business from your device and clicking on the website, only to find that you can barely read the text. Within seconds, you become frustrated and move to the next result on your list.

As a business owner, mobile optimization for your website has become extremely important. To get a better idea of what mobile optimization is, WCA interviewed TradeMarkMedia‘s VP of User Experience Andrea Richeson and Technology Director Stephen Tidmore for some resourceful insights:

Q: What is responsive Web design?

A: Responsive Web design means creating websites and Web applications that “respond” to whatever device they’re being used on––desktop computer, smartphone, tablet, etc. This means that the content on the website––text, images, and video––changes to fit your screen size and resolution. The idea behind mobile-responsive design is to deliver a comparable user experience, regardless of how the user is viewing your site.

Q: Why is mobile-responsiveness so vital?

A: More than half of all Internet traffic originates from a mobile device. (That’s worldwide; in America, it’s estimated slightly less than half.) In other words, half of the people who could be enjoying your website––and buying from you, engaging with you, etc.––probably aren’t. If using your non-responsive website is a pain, and your competitors offer a user-friendly experience, you’re at a competitive disadvantage.

Q: How can you optimize your website for mobile users?

A: It depends on what your website is built upon and what content you have. If you have one of those simple, out-of-the-box websites (like Squarespace or Wix) that doesn’t have much content or functionality, your website is probably mobile-friendly already.

But if your organization requires something more sophisticated or powerful than a $20/month website, then you’ll probably need to hire a Web designer. That designer should build your company’s website with mobile users in mind––from scratch.

At TradeMark, we design and build a lot of websites. These days, a good number of our clients hire us to turn their websites that were designed for desktops into mobile-friendly sites. And we always approach these projects with the unique needs of the mobile user in mind, often redesigning their entire Web presence from scratch.

Sure, we could just code their current desktop version to collapse into something more mobile-friendly. And that’s a perfectly fine solution if time or budget is a constraint. But to really seize a competitive advantage over websites that aren’t taking mobile users into consideration––and there are plenty of those––a ground-up redesign is most effective.

Q: What can you do to design your website for mobile use?

A: Your website is either mobile-responsive or it isn’t. Which means, unfortunately, that if your site isn’t mobile-responsive, there’s almost nothing you can do to make it so, short of redesigning and developing it.

That said, if you absolutely cannot invest in a mobile design right now, there are a couple of things you can do to lessen the pain on your mobile users:

1. Don’t set fixed widths on images or content blocks. If the widths on your website are too wide it increases the chance that mobile users will have to scroll left and right to read each sentence. If you set widths with percentages instead of fixed sizes, your users should be able to read each section of content without much, if any, left-to-right scrolling.

2. Place your menu at the top of the screen (instead of the left). This way, if someone opens your site on their phone, they can use the natural up-and-down swiping to see your menu items, instead of having to constantly move to the left to find it. This would also ensure your content starts flush to the left side of the screen instead of flush against your vertical menu.

Q: What tools can companies use to get mobile-friendly sites?

A: If your website is using a common theme (layout) from a packaged content management system (CMS) like Squarespace, Wix, or even some WordPress options, the mobile-friendliness is probably already built in––i.e. you don’t have to do anything. (Same goes for front-end frameworks like Foundation or Bootstrap.)

But those options are usually too limited for small and medium businesses, which require a more custom design that speaks directly to their audience. In that case, the best way to join the mobile revolution is to hire a great digital agency as your partner.

As you can see, TradeMarkMedia gives us some great advice on what we can do to take action and optimize a website for smartphones and tablets. Factors like site design, site structure, and page speed, all play a vital role in how well your site can function on another device. If there is one thing you can do to increase your brand presence, mobile optimization is it.