Design Your Website with Mobile Consideration
New phones are driving explosive (2x to 10x+) mobile internet usage growth.
What can you do to maximize your user engagement with this audience? Take into considersation these factors when designing your website:
1) Smaller and Different Proportioned Screen Resolutions
2) Bandwidth Limitations
3) Similar Multi-Channel User Interface
Screen resolutions are dramatically different on your phone. Web designers have long designed their pages to fit the lowest, but still predominant, PC screen size which is usually some multiple of 4×3 (Ex: 800 x 600 pixels). Several common mobile phone resolutions are: 128 × 160 pixels, 176 × 220 pixels, 240 × 320 pixels, and 320 × 480 pixels (iPhone). These multiples vary from a 4×3 and are not consistent. To adjust for this, you should consider a single column design.
In addition, you should consider scaling back your use of images. Mobile connection speeds are significantly lagging behind fixed broadband speeds, which are now the norm with PC users in the U.S. If you are going to offer a mobile-only website, design it with the above listed factors in mind; and you will allow for a more consistent user interface when your website is accessed from each of these channels.
For example, Facebook is coming out with a new iPhone application in September which looks very similar to the their website. You can see from this article (http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/20/facebooks-forthcoming-iphone-app-to-be-more-like-its-web-site-that-site-redesign-was-no-coincidence/) how similar the application is to their website, leading to an easier adoption by users.
Ryan Weber, Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Co-Founder, W3i Holdings, LLC
Ryan is an internet marketing pioneer with over eight profitable years evolving W3i (owner of Freeze.com) in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.
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September 27th, 2008 at 8:33 am
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