Mobile Website Design

Over the past several months, I've had the opportunity to design a few mobile sites, and from a designer's perspective, they're a lot of fun. What I find engaging are the design challenges that come with optimizing a full-size website for a small screen.

Solutions to these challenges are not as hard to come by as you may think. A limited amount of space and substantially less content combine to make designing mobile websites fairly quick and painless. What follows are some examples from our portfolio, with design elements that make for a good mobile website design.

Buttons

It's not uncommon for a button to be really big on a mobile site, sometimes bigger than those you'd find on a full-scale website. It makes sense because on a phone, users are browsing and clicking with their fingers, which are much less nimble and much less accurate than a mouse.

Examples

Navigation

For a mobile site, navigation is often edited to the bare necessities. Conserving as much space for content as possible, while maintaining and efficient way for users to find the information they seek, should be the goal of any good mobile design. Simple navigation is a sure-fire way to accomplish that goal.

Examples

Mobile Design

Too often, mobile sites are designed poorly, or not designed at all, which drives traffic away. It's important that a mobile site look and feel like it's full-size counterpart. The two designs must be congruent so that users know they're in the right place and begin to build a relationship with the brand.

Example

The Future of Mobile Design

What's exciting about mobile design is that it's a relative infant when compared to the world wide web. Mobile technology is growing exponentially, along with the number of people to browse the web primarily on a mobile device. In two or three years, mobile browsing maybe the only way people get online, and I'll be excited to design their experience.

Is your website ready for mobile?

So you're interested in seeing how a mobile website can help your business — awesome. We think that the best place to start is our free website analysis; it'll give you a good idea of how your main website is performing, as well as your opportunities for success with a mobile site.