Designing a Website for the Mobile Web
This blog entry was posted on October 24, 2008.
The mobile web is a wide open field in web design. It is the cutting edge for web marketing and businesses are quickly converting their websites to be mobile web compatible to take advantage of this growing market.
Text vs. graphics: Should your mobile website be text only or should it include graphics too? The smallest screens are only 128 x 160 and these work best with text only. The trend is toward larger screen sizes. Not only do mobile web sites have to fit a small screen, they have to work with several sizes of small screens. Graphics work well on medium and larger screen sizes. Graphics must be small in size and be able to load quickly.
Size: What size screen should designers design for? This really depends on what mobile phone your target market is using.
- Feature phones such as the RAZR V3 has a smaller screen with a size of 176 x 220 pixels. Today these are the most popular mobile devices for accessing the Internet.
- Smart phones such as the Apple iPhone, have a larger screen size of 480x 320. Smart phones are the fastest growing segment of the cell phone market.
If you are going after a blended market (mix of feature phone users and smart phone users), a maximum size of 200 x 250 pixels is recommended.
Location: Mobile websites can be located on a separate domain (.mobi for mobile websites only) or as a sub-domain on your current website. Web sites can automatically detect what platform a visitor is accessing the site through and automatically direct them to the appropriately sized website.
Keep it simple: Mobile website design requires sites to be narrower, have less functionality, simpler navigation and smaller images. In mobile web design, less is more. Allow visitors to reach the content in as few steps as possible.
Future: What does the future hold for mobile marketing? People will be trading in their cell phones for smart phones at ever increasing rates. This will drive mobile web to become mainstream in 2009. By the end of 2009, most major companies will have mobile compatible websites. Within the next 3 years, most businesses will have mobile versions of their website to take advantage of this trend.
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Filed under: Mobile Web,Website Design
This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 4:40 am and is filed under Mobile Web, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
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