Are you making your website mobile-friendly?

In the past few years, mobile web development has exploded. The popularity of the mobile web has increased to the point that web designers and developers can no longer ignore it. A significant growth of mobile web is seen in the developing nations where people are directly laying their hands on mobiles rather than PCs. Mobile website development isn't just a matter of mobile apps or site, there is a vast array of options that you have to keep an account of.

When thinking about the categories of mobile phones that you're site will serve, you need to keep two types of mobile phones in mind:

• Feature phones: Phones with browsers which can't render normal desktop pages. This includes browsers such as cHTML (iMode), WAP, WML, etc.

• Smartphones: Phones that render desktop pages to some extent. This includes mobile browsers which can render HTML5 and involves devices such as iPhones and Android phones.

Apart from the aforementioned factors, there are few important aspects that you must keep note of during mobile web development. So let's dig in:

1) Reduce the amount of text used:

Remember, everything that fits on a PC isn't going to fit reasonably on a mobile web page. In mobiles, space is short and you must note that every pixel counts. So it's important to reduce the texts and content to be used on the mobile version.

2) Use single column layouts:

Try to create single column pages for mobile-optimized websites. We often face difficulty in viewing wide web pages in our mobile phones. Even on smartphones, if a wide web page load up, the texts and the contents often zoom out. In this case, we zoom in and then view the text. This isn't an easy task since every time zooming in and out for viewing content can be quite cumbersome. So if you create a mobile website, ensure that the pages have single columns and the content of the page expands downwards and not across. This way, the readability of the site improves.

3) Navigation should be different:

Effective navigation is a must for mobile web development.

• You can place the navigation and the site search at the top of the homepage. This is great for users who want to directly search for a product or item without reading the rest of the content. This is ideal for users of ecommerce sites who already have a particular category in mind and want to search straight away.

• Try to place a dropdown link at the top or bottom of the page. This gives users easy accessibility of all the pages of the site.

• Put a 'Back' button on every page apart from the homepage. This creates easy navigation and makes a website more organized.

4) Make use of in-built functionality for effective mobile web development:

• It's better if you allow users to automatically click or tap a phone number through the 'Contact us' pages or 'Store finder' pages. This will improve the navigation of the mobile website.

• It's also a good idea if you give your users an option to select an address and open the phone's map application.

Nowadays, every company understands the need to develop mobile optimized sites. The process of creating a responsive mobile website with good navigation and excellent layout is quite a challenging task. You need to ensure that the mobile-optimized websites run seamlessly on smartphones.

So when are you creating your mobile friendly website that'll engage the users , offer client interaction and provide smart searching capabilities?