Every year, more people are using smartphones to browse the internet than ever before. With the devices getting stronger and more features becoming available, a responsive design for your website is becoming a must-have feature. However, it also goes deeper than this because people are doing something else on mobile more than ever; buying products and services.
With the increase in the number of apps on the store and the improvements in mobile security, we can now buy products safely on our mobile devices and it’s convenient. Why not order something from the couch, desk, train as we commute, or anywhere else in the world? This year, you need your website to be responsive and here are some tips to help you master this process.
Mobile First – Often, it can actually be harder to scale down than up which is why many companies are choosing to create their mobile website first. From here, it can be scaled up to tablets and desktops with fewer problems. If you’ve been on mobile websites that haven’t been designed properly, you’ll notice the text and logo are both big problems along with the text size. Once you know you can read all text on a mobile device and the small screen, reading it on tablet and desktop simply will not be a problem.
Navigation – When looking at a website, we view multiple pages to learn more about the company and ensure they can help us with the needs we have. Ecommerce design company – Comalytics told us that if navigation is poor, this ruins your chances of seeing success because they’ll click away within seconds and find a website that does work on mobile. Most commonly, this happens when the drop-down menu arrow is impossible to touch or if there’s no clear path to other pages. On mobile, you have an opportunity to keep things simple and direct people to your best pages so use it.
Images – Since you’re working with such a small screen, images will be a big concern for your business. Firstly, they need to be an appropriate size so the user doesn’t have to scroll for five minutes before finding the next piece of text. Secondly, we recommend avoiding PNG files at all costs because these files will be huge. With large files, each page will take longer to load and your business will pay. Think about when you surf the internet yourself, how long does it take for a page to not load before you press ‘Back’ and look for an alternative?
Clean Design – In terms of the design itself, we recommend keeping it clean and simple. As you know, the screens on mobile devices are very small so having it cluttered will only lead to confusion and frustration. Instead, everything should be clearly laid out and the site should be easy to navigate from one page to the next.
Hire a Professional – In summary, responsive website design for mobile is essential if you’re to see success this year and we hope to have portrayed this effectively today. For this reason, we recommend getting in touch with a professional service if you really don’t know where to start. With many reliable mobile design companies available these days, it’s better to invest in a professional website than do it yourself and regret the result. As long as it matches your branding and the checkout process is easy, it should end up paying for itself.
In addition to this, you can also find a service that’ll maintain your site too because this eliminates downtime and ensures your website is updated at all times!