Improve the user's experience

Let's face it, if a user visits a website on their mobile phone, PDA or iPad, and has a negative experience, they are going to leave pretty quickly. And never come back. Boom. You just lost a customer.

There are many issues with viewing websites designed for computer screens on a mobile device, and any one of these could be the deciding factor between a user pressing "buy product" or "close website".

Can you really afford not to solve these issues?

Screen size

Most website are designed for screen resolutions of 1024 x 768 pixels, whereas the average mobile phone screen is only 240 x 320.

Imagine the frustration this would cause if someone was trying to look at your website on their phone, and could only view a small proportion of the layout at any one time!

They would be forced to scroll their screen both horizontally and vertically in order to find what they were looking for, which is both time consuming and confusing.

A mobile website is designed to fit on smaller screens, and they usually incorporate a flexible (fluid) layout so that the width of the website automatically changes depending on what size screen the phone has to allow the content to fit without horizontal scrolling being necessary.

Effective information organisation

Vertical scrolling can still take a lot of time, and users may easily become frustrated and leave your site.

Mobile websites allow information to be organised by relevance, so that the most important information is shown at the top of the site, thus reducing the need for the user to scroll.

Non-essential information can be "stripped out" to produce more streamlined content that still informs the user of your business, but doesn't take up too much space or download time.

Clearer navigation

They key to a successful mobile website is simplified navigation. Try to include only the most relevant links, and ensure that they are displayed correctly.

Your current website might have a visually-appealing-drop-down-multi-layer-dynamic-colour-changing navigation which looks GREAT on computer browers, but view it on a mobile and - oh dear - the phone doesn't know how to display it and the user is stuck on the homepage. Not good.

By reorganising navigation buttons into a simple list, users can easily browse the different pages. Another feature which should be added is a "back" link to allow the user to return to the previous page. This is not required on a normal website, as browsers include this, however in order to save screen space, mobile browsers do not. It is infuriating for users if they have clicked the wrong link and can't get back to where they just came from.

Make it easier!

Some things that work very well on a computer web browser, such as web forms (contact forms) can be difficult to use on mobile devices, particularly with touch screens where the boxes often appear close together and are difficult to select.

Mobile websites aid the user by showing radio buttons or drop down menus instead of text boxes as much as possible. Typing lots of text is time-consuming and mistake prone. The use of auto-select should be used to cut down the time it takes for a user to interact with a mobile business, for example address lookups when a postcode is entered.

Fast to load

Sometimes mobile internet connections can be very slow. This is made worse is a website has large images, videos or animations which increase the filesize of the page and drastically increase download time. Mobile websites tend to have very little images, and no videos.

Users are much more likely to return to a fast loading website with no pictures than a slow loading website with pretty photographs and backgrounds.

Make it stylish!

Different phones have different screen contrasts. This is more of a problem then different computer monitor screens, therefore some adjustment of your company's colour scheme may be necessary. It is common to use dark grey or black text on a white background for the majority of the page content, though of course this can be customised to whatever you want - as long as is visible!

Since screens are fairly small, the use of whitespace to break up content is essential. If a page is cramped with different sections of content touching each other or images appearing on top of text, it will be overcrowded and difficult to use. By separating different aspects on a page - for example navigation, company logo and text about the company - the user can easily see where one element ends and the next begins, allowing for a greater aesthetic appeal.

That being said, the opposite is also true - too much whitespace and the screen appears empty which forces the user to scroll unnecessarily. Or worse, they might not realise that there is anything else on the page if an entire section has been "pushed" off the screen due to too much empty space surrounding it. This could result in important information being missed.

Make your business current

Let's face it, social networking is the latest trend and it looks like it is here to stay. With mobile websites, you can link to your business' Twitter, Facebook or Blogger pages and make it simple for a user to follow you, join your group or subscribe to your blog posts. Once you have done this, you will never be forgotten as all of your updates appear when they next visit these popular sites.