Mobile Website Design

Most websites while designing think and care about device independence. In the ideal world, a website should be designed and coded in a way that the pages are rendered exactly the same way with the same efficiency in the normal screen or the hand held device. However, coding standards, effort to save space, placement of buttons on sites and search engine optimization are all factors that lead to a divergence from the ideal world.

Mobile website design is a specialist venture and hence sites which care about being search engine friendly even when people look for their sites on their hand held devices, should take sufficient measures to ensure the same. The starting of course is by following strict coding standards are mobiles are non-forgiving. The browsers available to those searching on a mobile and those on the normal screen are different. This is another thing mobile website designers should keep in mind.

Since mobile search is still in its early days, the crawlers and bots used are different, something for mobile website designers to care about. Organizing the buttons in a logical fashion on the website is critical given the crunch in space on hand held devices and smart phones. Also the call actions and linking should be done to ensure maximum efficiency in mobiles. Something like external CSS can also be used because it separates the design and content which will help update the design easily. It also has the added advantage of changing rendering styles based on various devices which is a common path adopted by many sites. Use of certain elements in one form and then hiding it in the other case is one good solution to ensure sites are efficient in mobiles and normal computers. . The download time should also be as less as possible to ensure that the sites are light and rendered quickly making them more search engine friendly.

Another important thing for consideration is the rendering of a page in different screen resolutions which can be managed well using external CSS. There is also a big difference in the way people search on mobiles e.g. the number of words per query in mobiles is much less than what it is in the normal scenario. Again, something like an AdMob that puts links related to a subject has increased traffic on websites, because users of mobiles have been found to click more than they prefer to type. Simple things like main content coming above navigation can improve the search engine friendliness of a website.