Mobile is the main topic in website design because we do most of our searching and shopping on our device now. But at the same time, most websites were built with desktop users in mind.
Mobile users need sites which fits well on small screens, use touch controls, are easy to navigate, and load quicker.
What do you need to make your website mobile friendly? Let’s go over the basics.
Spend some time researching how to build a website and you’ll see terms like mobile-optimized, mobile-friendly, and “mobile first.”
How Mobile-Friendly Websites Look Like?
Let’s focus first on the way a mobile-friendly site looks because visitors will decide on the first sight whether they want to stay on your site due to its appearance. There is four basic component a good mobile-friendly template or custom design will include:
1. Responsive Page Display
Responsive design is the foundation of a mobile-friendly website. Without it, a smartphone or tablet user who visits your site will see a miniaturized version of your desktop site, which means they’ll have to scroll vertically and horizontally to find anything—and that means they’ll just leave and go somewhere else.
A flexible site design, either custom-built or based on a template, automatically previews your site properly on any type of mobile a visitor is using, whether they’re using it in portrait or landscape orientation.
2. Text Formatting Proper
Create your blocks of text short and break them up with headlines and bulleted lists when it makes sense to include them. It’s hard for our eyes to track close-together lines of text on small screens, so great paragraphs make it more likely that your visitors won't lose their place and get frustrated.
3. Optimized Media Display
Test your infographics, images, and videos to make sure they look right on mobiles and tablets, without requiring users to scroll or resize their display to see your media.
4. Readable Fonts
Mobile friendly templates will include fonts that are easy for mobile users to read. But you may want to change around a bit with the fonts mainly if you have a logo that uses a particular typeface.
Generally, the easiest fonts Sans serif with clean lines are to read on mobile devices, where glare and screen size can make serif fonts and novelty fonts like script hard to see clearly. Finally go up a size on your fonts—because no one wants to try to read tiny text, even if it’s sans serif.
