How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly

When we design a website our main concern is, how it looks on a Desktop high resolution screen. It is not like people forget mobile users while designing but since majority of traffic comes via Desktop browsers, mobile users are often neglected. 

But the scenario has changed since iPhone. Most of mobile browsers have full fleched HTML support. Now, most smartphones are capable web browsing machine. Still, mobile screens are of lower resolution as compared to Desktop screen (I am comparing resolution and not pixel density) and navigating can be pretty difficult at times.

What we want is a simple website which is optimized for all kind of Mobile phones and displays every blog post clutter free. 

So a solution for this can be -- building a subdomain on your website. Like if your website has an URL like awesomewebsite.com, you can make a subdomain like m.awesomewebsite.com. This will significantly help as all visitor will visit your domain but only mobile users will be redirected to mobile version of your site. This will not make any changes to your websites rankings.

Building a mobile version can be a tricky part if you do not know basic HTML formatting. Though you can hire a person to do it at a very reasonable price. And while you make changes to your website's subdomain, your actual website won't be affected. 

If you didn't like the idea of setting up a sub domain on your domain and if you want to bring all users -- Mobile and desktop -- under one URL, you may have to redesign your blog from ground up. You might also have to take down your website for some hours for changes to take place. This approach may take time and money because a dynamic design is hard to make. I made you count disadvantages but here are some advantages you will have in long term by this kind of approach. 

1. Using one URL maybe helpful because users will find it easy to interact. Suppose a mobile user visits your website and likes your content. He shares it on Facebook and his friends also visits the website. Since some of his friends were using desktop they are still directed to mobile version of site which looks miniature on their large screens. The responsive website may help here because since the mobile user and desktop user uses same URL they may both see the same content in different ways but still in User friendly manner. 

2.Since redirection of URL do not take place, your website loads up significantly faster. 

3. It keeps your site indexed once. Since there will be same content on your mobile and desktop versions, Google have to index it again and again. Google bots do not like to index same things again and possibility is some of your content will remain unindexed. Also, Google says "URL's which use dynamic/responsive design, that serve all users under same Domain with same CSS and HTML codes are Recommended." Since Google can make or break your website's traffic, you should consider what it says.

If you decide to make your responsive website design by your own, here is Squarespace an inexpensive webhosting service that lets you create a responsive website via a drag-and-drop interface.

If you are neither ready with either of our suggestion, you may find mofuse a great service. This service will give you a personal domain like yourdomain.mofuse.mobi. Though it is quite expensive and it isn't has a flexible approach.

Blogspot users are quite lucky as they can set Dynamic view, in template menu -- which are designed by Google and are responsive design. They have to do nothing, but just clicking on "Apply this Template". 

If you have any question related to this article you may comment below. Or you can reach us for off-topic question @thetechnext on Twitter.


Also see:
You have read this article Social Media / Tips / Web Apps with the title How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly. You can bookmark this page URL https://angryblackmf.blogspot.com/2012/11/how-to-make-your-website-mobile-friendly.html. Thanks!

1 comment for "How To Make Your Website Mobile Friendly"

  1. Great article but I'm not sure if it helps in terms of instructions and how to's. Converting your website to become mobile-friendly doesn’t have to be complicated. There are a lot of programs and applications that can help make the process a lot easier.

    ReplyDelete