Everywhere you look, you find a friend, a family member, or a co-worker using a smart phone to check email, send an SMS or more recently browsing the web.
Stats show that as much as 30% of all mobile phone users utilize their cell phones to browse the internet. But the cell phone’s screen is really small so how do cell phones handle opening web pages?
There are two main ways that mobile phones handle opening large pages. One way is to zoom out and provide a view of the entire page with the option of zooming in where the user would like to see information legibly. The other approach is to serve the page as is, but the user will have to scroll back and forth, top and down to see the entire page.
Still, there is a number of technologies that won’t work on the cell phone. Javascript, Java, and flash are examples of technologies that will not work on mobile browsers.
These problems highlight the need for having a separate design for mobile phones. So how does the design need to be different for cell phones?
Well we first need to ask what is a mobile user mostly doing when he’s browsing online? Most of the times the mobile user is searching for contact information, directions, or recommendations.
So the first thing is to identify the information that a mobile user is looking for and making sure that we serve that in an effective fashion that allows the user to get what they need effectively and quickly.
You’ll find that for mobile users it’s a lot more effective to provide them with a paired down version of the normal website that has exactly what he needs in a simple navigation format. A simple page with contact information, links for a map, menu (if it’s for a restaurant) an overview what the company and so on.
These are some of the considerations that we need to keep in mind when developing a mobile site for mobile users. Mobile browsing is a new trend and any business owner needs to make sure that they have a version of their website that can be easily viewed by mobile users.