What’s important in designing for Mobile-readiness?
The two main constraints:
- Viewable / physical size of the interface (and there are many)
- Bandwidth. Which relates to webpage load times.
A tiny company can have an excellent and inexpensive Mobile Web Presence
- Site design must fit on the screen and not be crowded. Simple to say, more difficult to accomplish.
- Reduced content offered (images and text). This drives page load speed. We want snappy. This is a huge benefit if the access is over slower mobile phone connections.
- Design the nav for Fat Fingers. Use conventional buttons and menu symbols — consistent with other sites in your space.
- Which information would a typical user accessing the site with a given appliance be looking for? A phone number, address? Special Offer. Blue Plate Special? Feature these items prominently.
- Locality. Is your business part of a particular geography? If so, what common interests would your visitors have in your area. If you’re selling books, where’s the coffee?
I enjoy seeing these same issues covered in other sites. For instance see parallel advice at www.dummies.com. Buy their book!
Newer generations of site building software and hosting packages are better and better at controlling for these kinds of issues.
WordPress.com of course. Wix.com is another.
If you have a legacy HTML or XHTML site — you might consider migrating your message, offers and content to one of these. It’s not as difficult as you might expect. It’s not 1999 anymore. You can do it!
If your needs are sophisticated (like e-commerce) — Amazon Web Services. But you’ll need an expert to operate with Amazon. Elsewhere in this blog I’ve recommended that Small Businesses NOT try to operate payment processing systems within their web-presence. Security issues and headaches. Farm it out. AWS and otherwise QuickBooksOnline are places to start.
Designed Online Success 