Many people browse the web with a mobile device. How do you prepare your website for mobile users?

Mobile browsers are growing rapidly and a lot of business owners are concerned with how to optimised their website for these users.

First there are some general rules of thumb which you do have to take into account for mobile users. Then there are some decisions to be made how to allow access to mobile users.

Do you want to a Mobile Website or do you want a Mobile Friendly site?? Yes there is a difference.

Mobile Website: Here is a perfect example of a Mobile Website. Sydney Morning Herald has created a mobile website specifically designed to allow it to render within the parameters of the mobile device being used. It makes for a pleasant experience for the user compared to a regular site. SMH have done this as the rendering of their full site would drive people crazy. See below

It now makes it very difficult to read and understand without stretching the screen. It also takes longer to load and shows information that is probably not relevant to the visitor.

Mobile Friendly Site: These sites eliminate the use to technology that limits the experience for the visitor. The best examples of this are sites which are predominantly use flash to drive the visitor experience. In these cases, the site will not launch on a mobile device and hence render the experience as useless.

A point of special consideration, before you start designing your website or your mobile site, is how you would like to allow mobile users to access your page. There are several options, ranging from automatic generation of mobile pages under the same URL's to having dedicated mobile pages to even having special (sub) domains for mobile devices. The way you want to deal with the pages in your domain greatly impacts the way you design the mobile web pages.

Using the same URL for both the mobile and desktop version has huge benefits. The biggest benefit is that for users the URL does not matter: people might enter a URL by hand, are originating from a RSS feed or follow a link from another website and are expecting specific content. Basically all you have to do is strip or modify the content based on the client capabilities.

Whatever you decide works best for you and for your clients, Smooth Corporate can build and provide the solution to ensure you have a presence in the Mobile Sense. If you are unsure about the presentation of your Website on a mobile device or would like further information, please feel free to Contact Us through the details on the website or directly through to your Smooth Corporate representative.