Friday 9 December 2011

Mobile Website Design

Yorkshire is a major tourism region and visitors are relying heavily these days on their Smartphones and mobile phones to locate Yorkshire businesses and tourist attractions. Many of our Yorkshire website design clients are starting to recognise the need for App development and a good mobile interface to allow for this ever-emerging market.

Is it time to consider a mobile website design for your business? It's not just about tourism, Smartphones offer the consumer an ability to contact any type of business on the move as well as do some online Christmas shopping while they're at it!

More specifically to our Yorkshire clients, a mobile site may mean extra online accommodation bookings, beauty therapy appointments, computer game purchases or even looking up a great place to have a meal.

With Christmas coming up especially (I wonder how many phones will be sold as Christmas presents this year?!), the Smartphone and mobile internet market will be bigger than ever in 2012. Statistics are now saying that mobile internet is soon to overtake desktop and laptop/notebook browsing.

We are all starting to get used to having a wealth of information and websites available to us on the move, whether on an iPad or a Google Android phone...

Every hit your website gets from a mobile device isn't a potential customer, but rather has the potential to aggravate and lose your visitor to another business that has catered correctly to mobile interface design.

Currently most websites will load up on Smartphones and show correctly (unless using flash or other third party plugins), the problem is the text will be tiny, the images indistinguishable and menus are usually very difficult to navigate correctly.

This is not the fault of your website designer - with websites designed for larger platforms this is unavoidable. To make the user interface suit everyone's devices would mean a lesser experience for the user, so why would we want to strip away the quality that the power of a desktop computer can serve. Some websites can be designed to function correctly across all devices regardless of the type, but for most of the internet this is a lot to ask. In my opinion our best option is to detect what device a visitor is using when they hit one of our websites and then direct them to a portal created for the best specific viewing experience possible.

Redirecting visitors to different website portals or sites isn't a new phenomenon, many websites used to do this for specific browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Explorer or Opera. The need for browser-specific sites is dying out thankfully with CSS 3, html5 and other web standards being used in modern browser design. As improvements are made, along come different problems... We now have more screen sizes than ever, more types of computer than before, different operating systems and platforms - as well as interfaces such as small mobile keyboards, touch screens and even speech recognition with services such as Siri on the iPhone.

Whatever comes next will not fit to your website design, you must instead fit to its design! Mobile, for now, means a smaller screen - it has to fit in your pocket. iPhones and Android phones are increasing screen resolution to provide more screen space, but until we get user interfaces that can project or interface glasses we can wear that plug into our mobiles, the need for mobile websites will only increase. Unless of course we all get better eyesight first with laser eye surgery!

It's all about creating simplified mobile sites that are attached to your standard desktop website. The mobile site may have a prefix to the domain address or different extension, and the site itself must have larger buttons and menus that can be used easily on a mobile as well a clean matching interface to allow the best user experience.

If you're interested in how these kind of mobile websites are designed and how they work please visit www.hostingyorkshire.uk on a mobile Smartphone to see the kind of mobile website we can create for you.

We are also currently working on Yorkshire and York App development and other ways to get your business and our clients in Yorkshire featured heavily on mobile devices.

As always I'm happy to help anyone with questions or any businesses in need of Mobile Website Design, visit www.hostingyorkshire.uk and send me an email.