How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website that Delights Your Visitors
By Kelly Bergeron
According to Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report for 2015, over 5.2 Billion people are mobile phone users — that’s 73% of the population. With Google recently making changes to their ranking system, it might be time to make your website more mobile-friendly. Google has made it clear that if your site isn’t mobile-friendly, your search rank will suffer.
When designing your site using RWD (Responsive Web Design) in mind, you are providing an optimal viewing experience across a range of devices by using a fluid and grid-based approach. Flexible images and breakpoints in elements are crucial to crafting a seamless experience. Designing mobile-first actually makes it easier to scale up to desktop, as opposed to shrinking down to mobile.
Companies have come to realize the importance of RWD through consumer interactions on their mobile-devices, as a whopping 25% of web searches are done through mobile devices. Mobile users are looking for quick information, easy to consume and act upon. If you make it easy for the user to take action, you are cutting out unnecessary steps and increasing your opportunity to engage with your audience.
At Salesforce, we focus on building an optimized mobile experience, first and foremost. Responsiveness and user experience are keys to our customer’s success in navigating our range of product offerings. With 80 percent less screen real estate, we work to provide core content and important functionality in the most intuitive way possible.
Tackling RWD is a multi-step process, involving many teams. Here are some tips on how to make a website more mobile-friendly:
- Create goals and outline your objectives.
- Develop your content strategy.
- Define the actions you want your user to take.
- Build your prototypes, work with your creative team, and UX partners.
- Optimize your SEO. Research your competitors. Define your keyword strategy.
- Build out your pages/modules/templates and populate with content.
- Test on various devices.
- Launch your product. Remember: use the iterative approach. User testing will help you determine what is working and what is in need of refining.
Keep in mind that many Content Management Systems offer pre-built themes that cater to mobile-friendly site creation. They can help take away the guesswork, so you can just focus on content creation, without the hassle of building the components.
In conclusion, making your mobile website a priority will be key to your overall web strategy. Realize that if you aren’t designing around these different devices, you are losing major opportunities to connect to your customers. Get ahead of the curve and tackle mobile design right from the start and you’ll find yourself eliminating a lot of the guesswork when it comes to designing for the desktop.
