WEBSITE   |   POSTED ON 18.08.2015

As mobile technology becomes more and more popular in Australia it’s important to ensure that your website is as mobile-friendly as possible. Over 77% of Australians own a smartphone and mobile represents half of all ecommerce traffic, a figure set to grow over the foreseeable future.

A sign of this trend is Google recently expanding and prioritising mobile friendliness. With this is mind, Liquid Creativity offers the top tips to ensure your website is more mobile-friendly.

Be responsive

Mobile responsiveness is when a website is designed to detect the device visitors are using and adjust the screen size and functionality accordingly. You can easily begin this process by designing for the smallest screen before testing on larger screens.

It’s also important to ensure that visitors can navigate your website and complete browsing, form completion, searching, purchasing and browsing across different devices with too much confusion or inconvenience. Consider a ‘save’ or ‘share’ function to allow for visitors to continue their journey at a later time. This makes your website more responsive and more usable.

Functionality

Functionality is key to designing a mobile-friendly website. Aspects such as links, scrolling banners, site navigation and menus should all be designed with thumbs in mind. This simply means that all of your site elements need to work for mobile scrolling, sliding and tapping. Avoid the viewer needing to ‘pinch’ – content is too small if pinching is required and you’ll only see an increase in click offs.

On mobile-friendly websites simplicity rules – place all crucial information such as user account functions, search bar, key promotions, popular content, main menu and logo above the fold. Remember that with mobile less is more. This mantra also ensures that information is able to be spaced out to avoid mis-clicking.

And lastly, mobile searchers will only tolerate a load time of up to five seconds – avoid heavy graphics and content in order slow load time and not annoy viewers.

Easy search

Search functions are extremely important on mobile platforms and so are extremely important when designing your website. Make the search bar found on each and every page and consider features such as spelling suggestions and autocomplete – both of these will serve to reduce the time taken to type in required information.

Quick and easy forms

Like with the search function above, you need to make form completion as quick and easy as possible. Reduce the number of essential fields, add autofill functionality, and consider a progress bar so users are aware of how much more there is to complete.

Other top tips

• Use video wisely and keep clips to under two minutes – they are more likely to be watched and they should not interfere with load times too much.
• If you run a PC version of your website and a mobile version (rather than being fully mobile responsive) never use the term full site when referring to the PC site as this implies that the mobile version is incomplete.
• Use geolocation technology to direct users directly to their nearest store, provide information in local times and currencies, or to offer targeted promotions.
• Provide the option to check out as a guest rather than an account holder to speed up the purchasing process.
• Use bullets points and lists rather than long-form content to allow users to quickly skim and identify the information they are seeking.

To learn more about designing websites to be more mobile-friendly, contact your local branding specialist Liquid Creativity.