As a followup to Part 1 of Mobile Website Best Practices, here we will continue to provide an overview of industry standards that can help build highly optimized, efficient and alluring websites for mobile device users and new potential customers for your business. The following are additional mobile website best practices:
Keep branding and functionality consistent between your standard and mobile websites: While your mobile website will have to be far more simplified than your standard website, there are some things that it will be important to keep consistent. For example, allowing users to save their searches and/or the items in their shopping carts will help create a seamless experience that will be more appealing to users.
Make sure to optimize visibility: This is more about how content looks on the page. For example, creating a high degree of contrast between the buttons and background, as well as making sure that the content fits on the screen (without the need to zoom in/or or scroll down too much), will greatly improve the visibility of your mobile website. Additionally, features like 3D effects for buttons and even negative space on the page can help promote optimal visibility.
Make sure that your mobile website will be compatible with all types of mobile devices: This will not only mean that your mobile website should be accessible for iPhones, Androids, iPads, Kindles, etc., but it also means that your mobile website should be able to adapt to both a horizontal and vertical orientation.
Use web analytics to track users’ preferences in order to continually improve your mobile website: Mobile web analytics are powerful, inciteful tools that can tell you how many users your website gets, how long users are staying on your website, which pages are more popular among users, etc. By tracking these factors, you can adjust less popular or effective elements of your website to increase the traffic to your website, as well as to improve the users’ experience.
