Telephone: 01257 410282
Telephone: 01257 410282
Mobile phones are set to be the next platform for access to the internet. It is quite a logical happening for the good reason of mobile phones being constant handy companions and the convenience of browsing when people are on the move. Mobile websites are as such suitable for connectivity in the hands where ever and whenever wanted, perfectly matching with consumer expectations. The arrival of the iPhone has changed the expectations of consumers propelling up the demand for mobile web services.
Websites designed for desktops and laptops are quite unsuited to fit with what should ideally suit mobile phones. The situation is just too poor an experience for the users as they are left stressed out for viewing the whole page on a small screen. It is frustrating enough to make feel better they didn’t. A number of companies have created a mobile version of their websites that suit viewing content on the mobile phone screen.
Designing mobile friendly websites can not be as elaborate with graphics and dynamic features as created for conventional versions of computers. The mobile versions of websites are totally re-created design of whole content to make it provide every bit of vital information. These are simple in design with few essential constituents that can easily fit in the mobile screen for convenient viewing. Basic designing features spread over multiple considerations.
Basic purpose behind simplification is allowing unobstructed moving around the whole webpage. This necessitates elimination of formatting including frames, tables and graphics. The design is also focused at reducing the loading time as such a much balanced navigation support is created reducing the number of links.
Accommodating the whole page content on screen makes the content too small to be significant as also badly affecting the resolution. If not so, the users will have to do excessive scrolling. Therefore, to enable the users have complete page view provision of ‘Back To Top’ link on the pages is essential.
To enable the mobile users properly view the displays and graphics across the range of common screen sizes, mobile phones are already designed to accommodate varied resolutions. It is now the challenge of website designers to make the design mobile friendly at the same time, for mobile manufacturers integrate the display of website content. For this purpose, mobile devices supported on Blackberry, Symbian, Apple, Android, Windows 7 and the other operating systems are already available in resolutions of 320 x 240, 320 x 480, 360 x 480 to as high as 800 x 1280.
It would be impractical to leave the users scrolling in both horizontal and vertical directions. Better is arranging the text in columnar fashion with provision of text wrap and vertical scrolling.
The main website may have lot of versatile features and applications like pop ups, roll downs, internal and external links and such others. But, mobile phone screens are not suitable to apply all these. Hence, cutting out the links is practical approach for mobile website designing. The design should be rather based on simple links for page navigation only.
Maintaining clarity within small screen space of mobile phones is important. Therefore, the provision of adding a suitable distinction to the selected link is desirable.
A right mix of these design features should accomplish the basic necessities of websites designed for mobile phones.