5 Hacks for Designing a Stunning Mobile-Friendly Website

In the past, internet traffic was solely from computers. However, since the launch of smartphones, internet traffic sources have significantly shifted. Data collected in the first four months of 2022 showed that 90% of internet traffic emanated from smartphones. 

As a business or an organization looking to gain website traffic, e.g., for e-commerce, it is mandatory to optimize your website for mobile devices. Optimizing your website with good UX/UI design ensures that your mobile readers are impressed. 

The optimization of websites for mobile experience helps businesses unlock advertising opportunities on their website. This website optimization for mobile also offers other numerous benefits. 

Now that it is clear that optimizing your website for mobile view has many benefits, we now look at how you can go about designing a mobile-friendly site.

• Designing the Mobile View

Web design started way back when website access was limited to using computers only. Due to this, most website development software embraces a desktop-view approach as the native view when one is developing using the software.

Developing websites using a desktop view as the native view is unreasonable in this day and age where most internet traffic comes from smartphones. For improved customer satisfaction, it is advisable to develop your websites using a mobile-view first approach. There are several website designing companies in NYC that can develop websites for you keeping mobile view as the native view. The companies do this by developing the desktop view of the website as an optional website view.

Designing websites with a mobile-first view means that every user experience of the website is fundamentally designed around smartphones. With this, features such as highlighting areas when one hovers above them with the mouse are disabled because smartphones do not use a mouse for input.

When developing websites using a mobile-first view, you ought to ensure that the UI stays neat. An uncluttered website UI makes the website visitor experience more pleasant due to the reduced screen of real estate.

• Portrait Orientation

Internet access devices such as computers, laptops, tablets, etc., all take advantage of landscape view for websites. However, due to the screen size and aspect ratio of smartphones, websites on smartphones are better in portrait mode.

When developing your website for a good mobile-friendly experience, you ought to adapt the website for portrait orientation. Adapting a website for portrait orientation entails organizing items on the website sequentially in a top to bottom manner rather than organizing from left to right. 

If you are not well-educated pertaining to website design in portrait orientation, it is advisable to stick to center alignment. However, you can opt to integrate left and right justifications to create unique and appealing website designs that stand out from other portrait-oriented websites.  

When designing portrait-oriented websites, there are some rules to abide by. 

•  You should ensure that your website is not cluttered. This can be done by using padding and white spaces on your website to evenly distribute content or website sections on the portrait site layout. 
• You should not compromise website usability when designing a portrait-oriented site, it is advisable to design the website based on sections. This helps differentiate sections for users who skim on websites, you can use different colors, aesthetics, or background images. 

• Disabling Text Blocking and Pop-Up Ads

Monetization of websites is a common occurrence in this generation. However, monetizing a mobile website by enabling pop-up ads causes the website visitor to be irritated. The small amount of screen real estate on mobile phones means that pop-up ads block the visitor’s view completely.

Text blocking ads are also a common complaint on mobile websites. If you are to monetize your website by incorporating ads, you should use ads that align with the website’s text. These ad types do not obstruct the user’s view of the website content when exploring the site.

When monetizing a mobile website through ads, you should also ensure that you have few ads. This is because the available screen real estate on phones cannot support a high number of ads without negatively affecting the user experience. 

• Button, Menu, And Icon Size

The proportionality of your website with regard to screen size greatly contributes to its usability. On a desktop, having robust menus and submenus is acceptable. However, when designing a mobile website, you ought to avoid using a lot of menus and submenus. 

This is because the submenus and menus will be difficult to use on the small mobile screens. Submenus create a huge mess on the small mobile screens which reduces the website’s aesthetic appeal.

When designing a mobile-friendly website, you should also resize the website buttons and icon size to proportionally fit on mobile screens. You can use mockup software with a dialed-in mobile phone screen size and aspect ratio to get a mockup of how your buttons and icons are sized in relation to smartphone screens.

When designing a mobile-friendly website, you should also reduce button animations to ensure the site is lightweight for faster loading. Features such as changing the mouse icon to a hand icon should be disabled on a mobile website because they are irrelevant.

• Image Compression

The loading speed of a website is a factor that can get visitors to leave your website before seeing the website’s content. For desktop websites, one is required to use high-resolution images to ensure that the website is not blurry.

However, if you optimize a desktop website for mobile viewing while using the same images, the site will be slow. This is because the high-resolution images will take a lot of time to load without offering significant improvements to website resolution. For mobile websites, it is better to compress the images. This will offer faster website loading speeds without compromising the website’s visual quality.

Conclusion

When developing mobile-friendly websites, it is advisable to use frameworks that allow the website to resize based on the specific screen size. This will allow the site to change based on the different screen sizes and aspect ratios on smartphones.