Where to begin when planning to build your mobile website

Where to start when planning to build your mobile website.

As the fastest growing platform, mobile provides the opportunity to connect to those who don’t have access to a desktop or prefer to use their phone to do it all! Content needs to be delivered when the user wants it and without frustrations.  The surge in smart phone and tablet use should be the push you need to make sure your information is mobile friendly to satisfy the user experience. If more than 5% of your users are accessing through mobile, it’ probably time…wait I mean IT IS  time to create a mobile friendly site.

Create a Content Plan…

Don’t skip making a plan and hastily dive right in. You may think this will save time or is an unnecessary step, but trust me without a plan you will hit more roadblocks then need be. Your plan starts out by using your current sites analytics to see how users engage with your content. This will help you prioritize content and resources. Keeping in mind that a mobile screen is much smaller than a desktop, most likely not everything from your desktop site will be included on your mobile site,(this is assuming your current site was not built with mobile in mind) so you want to make sure you are delivering the most important information based on the analytics. The content used will help to guide the creation and design; you can’t visualize the design of your mobile site if you don’t know what it will contain. I recommend making an outline the same as you would before writing a paper.

Create a Design Plan…

With the content outline you can now start the design outline. (Yes you will actually sketch out or make another outline). When crafting this plan there are a few things to keep in mind, things to avoid and some must haves.

Things to consider

• You have to consider that different mobile devices have different screen sizes. Design and build with a "fluid" layout in mind. (Fluid or liquid design means it should flow smoothly no matter what space/platform it is in. More about fluid design.
• Keep download time in mind (reduce size of images, don’t use background images etc) not just because it is annoying but be considerate of the consumer’s data plan.  Remember in mobile, less is more.
• Content should be clear and easy to navigate through.  Put the most important information that you want users to see on the top of the page.
•  For ease of click ability your call to action buttons/ targets should be a minimum of 35px in size with whitespace in between elements. Remember you are designing for fingers.
• Forms may be necessary but can be difficult and time consuming for the user, reduce the headache by allowing choices through radio buttons or lists rather than making users enter  allot of data.
•  To call your site up correctly to a mobile browsers a few things need to be added to a mobile page to make it display on a mobile device. This will guide you through the tags needed in the head section of your mobile site.

Things to avoid

• Avoid background images, not only can they reduce readability in certain light but they increase download time.
• Avoid large images
• Avoid using tables

It can sometimes be challenging to make your mobile website display the same on all devices so I recommend keeping your design as clean and straight forward as possible.

Now that you have a start of what your mobile site will contain and how it will look, you can start building. Building a mobile website is very similar to your full site.