So you’re designing or re-designing a mobile website. That’s great! As you may or may not know approximately half of all web traffic now stems from hand-held devices, and the opportunity to get ahead of your competition by staying ahead of the trend will certainly be in your advantage. Here are some of the most important design principles for mobile website design for 2016.
First off you will need to decide what platform will work best for your particular website. You have a few different options when it comes to a mobile website, giving you flexibility. Firstly if you plan to re-build your entire website from scratch and design for mobile first you can save yourself some time by utilising a design which will work across platforms.
Alternatively if you are happy with your existing site but don’t think it will translate well into a mobile site then you could consider developing a mobile web app.
Or finally if you like your existing desktop site and wish to create a twin-able version for mobile, then simply design a responsive version of your existing website which will function across multiple platforms.
Once you’ve decided on the platform which you’ll base your mobile site in, it’s time to get to work with design, format and structure for your site, it’s pages, and it’s inner architecture.
Design
When it comes to design appearance, the golden rule of the day is not to over complicate things. At the dawn of the Internet websites looked like neon signs outside shop fronts, today though a more understated and minimal approach that allows your user to focus on your content is the way to go.
Format
As we’ve explained, the prominence of mobile browsing means that the format we see online has evolved in general. Try to format pages so that content sits as central as possible in order to maintain a uniform appearance across devices.
Architecture
Your site architecture concerns the underlying structure of your site. This means how your pages link together, and how many pages relate to pages. Having a clear and logical site architecture can make a big difference, both for your visitors, and for google’s crawlers and bots whiz decide how to rank and index your site.