Since the launch of the iPhone in 2007, the mobile web market has exploded in annual triple digit growth to become a multi-billion dollar industry with increasing smartphone and tablet options for consumers. Some sources even say that now 1 in 5 Internet users do NOT access the web with a "traditional" computer.
cascade has officially jumped into mobile web development and has slick new mobile site for Aeries Development and optimized form for Sokol Blosser!
Sokol Blosser was in need of a "cool" way for users to sign-up for their e-newsletter when handling Sokol Blosser's new iPads in the tasting room or at an event. When building the mobile form, we made several aesthetic changes (i.e. larger fonts and fields, field title overlays) and accounted for the variety of formatting differences between mobile devices, and the orientation of the devices (i.e. whether you're holding the device horizontally or vertically).
Aeries Development required an entirely new website fully optimized for mobile devices. If you view their site on your computer and then on your mobile device, the visual differences are slight. This is because the largest pain point of viewing their previous, non-optimized site on a mobile device was the time it took for the pages to load. Since the majority of their work is visually displayed, this was a large issue. By altering the way images and content were rendered, we vastly decreased loading time and provided a more efficient user experience. Other adjustments were also made to improve navigation both on the home and internal pages.
Here are a few items to consider when optimizing your site for mobile devices:
- How should navigation be altered? - The vast majority of mobile devices' navigation is driven by touch. Therefore, your main navigation and buttons used throughout the site must be adjusted for fingers (accounting for skinny and fat figures should definitely be a consideration...no joke). Here few examples of issues you might want to look for: buttons/links that are too close to one another, buttons/links that are too small to pinpoint with your finger, and if buttons/links can be easily identified as such.
- Screen size - Websites are normally designed to account for anywhere between 640 and 1280+ pixels. Mobile devices are obviously much, much smaller. Therefore, more often then not you'll need to reconsider the way your website navigation and page content is displayed (i.e. most websites switch from horizontal to vertical navigation during optimization). This can also include "cutting the fat" or removing some non-essential main navigation items and content since your "real estate" on a mobile screen is limited.
- Loading time - Although mobile loading speeds have improved over the past few years, the load speed for bringing up a non-optimized site is leagues behind that of a traditional computer. There are however many ways to get around this snag. Some easier than others. This is usually determined on a case-by-case scenario.
- Flash - Steve Jobs, why are you so stubborn?
