Meadowlark: Sheffield based responsive web consultancy

0114 2678965: 07879426788: enquiries@meadowlark.co.uk

Mobile friendly websites

0114 2678965: 07879426788: enquiries@meadowlark.co.uk

Mobile web traffic now accounts for at least a third of web traffic?

A staggering proportion of web traffic comes now from mobile phones. A key factor in this must be the convenience, and the provision of more favourable data agreements on mobile phone contracts. This has a number of implications. Some of these are covered on our responsive page, but here are some more.

• Small screens demand that information is better edited. It requires that the key material is present and easy to find, and the supporting information, like testimonials, and news feeds, well they may need to be pruned.
• Key information should be presented above the fold. This is a term used by the printing industry to refer to the placement of key news items above the fold of a newspaper. Web designers translate this to mean high up on the web page. So for example a companies contact details should appear at the top of the web page, and possibly every page, as part of the banner.
• Lacking a proper keyboard, mobile users need to be pandered to, particularly as mobile phones are really not that easy to use for general computing tasks. The site for example needs to minimise the effort required for them to pursue their contact with you. To send you an email for example, it is better to present an email form, than to expect the user to copy the address for later when they are at their desktop. The user is looking for convenience, and they will sacrifice security, and an audit trail to this end.

The pursuit of mobility, has in some ways made web development simpler, as sites cannot be so sophisticated.

An example of a mobile friendly web site

The website developed for Phil Geesing Machinery at www.used-machine-tools.co.uk demonstrates some mobile friendly aspects. It changes its form dependent upon the size of the screen used to view it. View it on a high resolution monitor, and the user sees the full content without constraints. As the viewers screen shrinks in size, less content is fitted across the screen, and more is displayed down the screen. Particularly, note how the menuing system adapts.

Where is web technology going next?

1. To sum up how important our mobile phones are, ask yourself what would inconvenience you most, loss of your wallet, or your mobile phone?

It is likely that as time passes the mobile phone will fill more and more computing roles. This bodes ill for laptops - those devices we always thought of as being at the top of the mobile friendly tree. For mobiles to become more ubiquitous as general computing devices, new technology must overcome the problems inherent with small screen sizes. Better speech recognition would be a start, but not in an office or with security in mind. What we really need is a neural interface that allows us to communicate with the computer by thought. In fact it is not that far away.