Mobile Web Design

These days more and more people are accessing the internet from their fancy BlackBerry smartphone. That means that there has been an increased interest in mobile web design. Websites that are designed for mobile phones need to be different than sites designed for computers. The main reason is that the small size of the mobile phone screen makes it impractical to use a lot of the design elements that are commonly used on website. The key to successful mobile web design is to keep things simple, that will usually give you the best results on the smaller screen.

The biggest issue that you are going to have to deal with when you are designing a site for a mobile phone is the small size of the screen. It is critical that your content be easy to read on a mobile phone. That means that you are going to want to have a lot of whitespace on your page. Images are not generally a good idea for a mobile website because of the small screen size and the time it takes for them to load. A nice clean page that is easy to read will be much more successful. The small screen size will also affect the way that you put links onto your page. Links can be hard to click on so it is a good idea to use a larger font size and leave extra whitespace around them so that they are easier to click. You will probably also want to have the entire background change color when somebody clicks on a link rather than just the link itself. This will help to make it easier to tell if they have successfully clicked on the link.

The small screen size also affects the way that you lay out the navigation on your page. You can’t really have a long navigation menu that requires people to scroll through the whole thing to find what they are looking for. Unless your site is only a couple of pages long you are going to layout your navigation a little bit differently. The best way is to have a navigation menu on the home page and then just have link on each page that takes visitors back to the home page. This will save people a lot of scrolling.

Another problem that you are likely to face when you are designing your site for a mobile phone is that there are hundreds of different handsets out there. They all have different screen sizes and this makes it nearly impossible to design a site that works well on all of them. The best solution is to use a percentage of screen size rather than pixels when you are choosing the width of your page. Other than that the best you can do is design your site for the most popular handsets and hope that it looks reasonably good on the less common handsets.