This is Mikel with TinyFrog Technologies. If you have web analytics or Google Analytics tied to your website and have had a chance to review the reports on your analytics, you’ll probably notice that a lot of the traffic coming to your website is coming from mobile devices and tablets. In fact, you’ve probably heard the statistics that mobile and tablet traffic is anywhere from 20% to 30% to 40% and obviously that’s increasing. So it’s really important that your website is optimized for mobile viewing. Most websites nowadays are in the process of being updated to be compatible for mobile viewing through responsive design or responsive technology.
What is Mobile First Design?
There’s a lot more that goes into a site in terms of setting it up to be compatible for mobile viewing. The messaging, the images, and any content on your site needs to be what we refer to as “designed for mobile first.” If you have one website that’s readjusting to be viewed on a desktop, a tablet and a mobile device, that content is not going to change. When someone’s on a mobile device, they’re not going to spend nearly as much time as they would on a site if they were on a desktop. They are not going to spend the time navigating through a wide variety of pages and reading a lot of dense content. If the same site is being used for cross-platform viewing, it really needs to be simplified. Even the desktop version needs to be simplified because the same habits that someone has viewing a website on a mobile device are going be transferred to when they’re viewing a site on a desktop or a tablet.
Your website should be really simple, really clean and it should be designed for what I would refer to as mobile first. This means the same website, the same content, the same messaging, the same graphics should be used whether it be on a desktop, a tablet, or mobile device. It really takes a completely different mindset for your designer, your strategist, and your developer when they’re designing a website. People are so used to looking at websites on mobile devices and tablets that that same psychology is going to be used when viewing the site on a desktop.
If your website is filled with dense content, a lot of images, and a lot of pages, it really should be re-thought during a redesign process to be cleaned up and simplified for viewing on a mobile device and for all the different viewing platforms and devices. And we refer to that as mobile first design. That’s one of the things that we really emphasize while working with our clients. We get them to rethink how their website is being viewed because it’s certainly being viewed on multiple devices now. It’s only going to go more in that direction over time. If you have any more questions on mobile first design, feel free to contact us. This is Mikel with TinyFrog Technologies. Thank you.
