In the early days of smartphones and the mobile web, users were generally forced to simply look up large, unwieldy desktop sites on their mobile browsers. These sites often took a prohibitively long time to load and were often hard to navigate on smaller mobile screens. It was not long, however, before web developers began to genuinely focus on making a more legitimately mobile friendly website for consumers and clients attempting to access information on-the-go.
In the early days of developing these mobile-friendly sites, however, developers often simply pared back the content available on a desktop site to only the minimal information they felt like users on the go were actually hoping to access. While this made their sites easier for mobile users to navigate, it also made them content poor, with many features still only available via the desktop site.
Changing strategy for an increasingly mobile world
In 2014, the global number of mobile users exceeded the number of desktop users for the first. In 2017, more than 40% of the population were “mobile only” users and that number is expected to climb to more than 70% by 2021. Google is rolling out a mobile-first index that will be weighted heavily in favor of sites that provided the same amount of content to mobile users as they did to those accessing desktop sites.
All of this adds up to an increasingly clear picture that website design that is merely mobile-friendly is no longer viable and a new age of mobile-first is on the rise. With a new era, a dawning of users accessing sites predominantly from their mobile devices, developers must find ways of providing the same content-rich sites to mobile users as to desktop users.
One of the challenges that mobile developers face is that mobile devices vary in a wide variety of ways. From bandwidth speed to screen size, mobile content must be tailored to work well on a wide variety of devices. The good news, however, is that while tailoring content to mobile devices is harder, mobile content translates better to desktop devices than desktop content translates to mobile devices. By adopting a mobile-first strategy, you essentially do the hard work first with the easier work following behind. Developing a mobile-first approach often simply means flipping the way in which website design is imagined, without necessarily making it more complicated.
Mobile-to-desktop means boxing and unboxing your content
One of the primary keys to mobile-first design is streamlining content while still making a full range of content accessible on-the-go. Drop down lists and menus are probably the best friends of a mobile-first approach to a truly mobile-friendly website. You can still provide the same amount of content on a mobile site as a desktop site by compartmentalizing the content more on the mobile site with a greater range of drop-down lists and menus. Conversely, drop-down lists for tasks like filling in forms work just as well on a desktop site as on a mobile site.
Your website is one of, if not the most important aspects of your marketing. We have heard it all here are Bizarre Marketing, “I don’t need a website I have a Facebook page” is one of the most common misconceptions we here. We construct powerful websites that show off your brand and all the benefits you have to offer, with strong calls to action that turn prospects into customers.
Tim Somers – Bizarre Marketing
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