Hello this is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies I’d like to talk a little bit about optimizing your website for mobile viewing. Almost every site that’s built nowadays is mobile responsive – meaning the site will be adjusting all the content for not only mobile devices but for also tablet devices. There’s a couple of really important things to focus on or to consider in terms of building or optimizing a website for mobile viewing.
Improve Your Website’s Top Navigation
First thing is the size of the navigation. Let’s say you have an informational site and you have maybe five or six items on the top-level navigation and then you have drop-down items with multiple items. When your website is being reduced or being adjusted for a mobile device obviously the site is going to be much smaller so that horizontal menu will no longer work.
What will typically happen is that the mobile menu is the three lines of the hamburger menu which automatically makes the the navigation vertical versus horizontal. If you have a vertical menu for viewing for mobile devices – if you have a lot of items in that menu if you have 20 or 30 items (as you can imagine this can be a very long list of items) for your navigation, which will make that mobile viewing very uncomfortable and very cumbersome.
If you have the intention of making your website optimized or designed well for mobile viewing, it’s really important that your menu is streamlined and clean as possible.
Add Content Without Cluttering the Site
It’s helpful when designing a website to have a strategist come in to focus on what we call the information architecture which is a fancy way for saying your navigation. Making the pages as logical and intuitive as in streamlined as clean as possible to hopefully reduce all the unnecessary pages to have a really clean menu. Now you might say to yourself that you need a lot of pages on your website, or a lot of content on your website because you’re focusing on optimizing your website for the search engines – there’s a number of different ways to get that content into the site without overwhelming the top level navigation. So that’s the first thing to focus on is making your nav menu very clean.
Use Click-to-Call Phone Numbers on Mobile
Secondly, this is a really simple thing but it’s surprising to me how many websites aren’t focusing on having an easy way to contact. If your website is a marketing site and lead capture it’s really important that when someone lands on your website and they are on a mobile device all they might want to do is call you. In a very prominent place on every single page of the website, it should have a click-to-call feature. It’s very easy to implement into a website on a mobile responsive website. Again, it’s surprising to me how many websites that I go to, on mobile devices, I have to scroll down – look for the phone number and when I find it, I can’t click it. And chances are, I’m not going to memorize it or go back to my content on my phone and call it. It’s really important that your phone number on your website is set up for click to call on a phone in a prominent place such as on the top of the web page – on your site and on every single page.
Create Simple Contact Forms
And third thing that’s important to consider for your mobile website again in the interest of making it easy for people to contact you is your form. If your contact form has 15 fields in it it’s gonna be very cumbersome for someone on a mobile device to type in and fill out every single field in that form. A form that’s very streamlined is really critical to not only encourage lead capture in your website and convert as much traffic as possible but it’s especially important in a mobile device. And the same form that’s used on your desktop version is also used in your mobile versions, which means you should consider designing that form from the perspective of mobile first.
Focusing on making your website as optimized from mobile as much as possible will make the user experience as clean as possible for that mobile user because it will impact a lot of your users. As you can imagine more and more people are going to websites and mobile devices, so optimizing your website for mobile viewing is really important.
If you have any questions on mobile first design or optimizing your website for mobile viewing in general feel free to contact us. This is Mikel with Tiny Frog Technologies. Thanks!
