Mobile Websites Development: Your Guide to Create a User-Friendly Site

How to Target Mobile Traffic

Without a doubt, smartphone sites are a must in today's smartphone-centric world, where the use of mobile devices has surpassed desktop usage and development of a site optimised for mobile is a must for every business. So let’s get to the bottom of the issue. Major search engines like Google has three ways to tell whether a visitor accesses the website via desktop or via a pocket device:

Which Option To Choose?

Although, we must dispel a myth that all mobile URLs start from “m.”: you are not restricted to this. You can use any top-level domain (google.mbl), subdomain or subfolder (google.com/mbl) that you like best for your web development project. Google favours responsively designed websites above other types, but of course, each of the options has its advantages and downfalls, and it is up to you to decide what fits you best.

Responsive Web Design

A responsively designed website sends data to a server to show one version or another, looking at the device’s configurations and display size. The CSS3 media queries used in this case also include such aspects as the display’s height, orientation, width, and resolution. A CSS3 media query recommended by Google is “@media only screen and (max-width: 640px) {...}”. An alternative CSS for smaller screen devices like iPhone or Android smartphones goes in-between the brackets. During development, make sure that the mobile version is placed beneath the major CSS so that it overwrites any settings defined for desktop computers

Max-Width And Min-Width Properties

If you set the max-width property at 640px, there is no difference whether devices is oriented horizontally or vertically. For example, iPhones have a width of 640px in landscape road and 480px in the portrait. It may sound tricky, but actually, these pixel sizes are not the actual pixel density of a smartphone, but CSS pixels. If you want to go into details, you can make your site to respond to the size of every device - you just have to set the intervals of min width and max width on the stage of development.

Clients

Responsive Web Design

Responsive design is a version of a web site, which represents to the user specially designed version of the site depending on what device he is visiting the page. All this views are integrated in one code.

Whether you choose to make your website responsive or go for any other version of a smartphone-friendly site, it will not hurt your rankings much if you have a proper marketing campaign and your content is optimised for search engines.

Dynamic Serving Sites Development

Dynamic serving sites use the desktop version as a default one, while CSS and HTML that need to be served are detected by user agents according to browsers and devices that request them.

Therefore, user agents play a key role in dynamic serving. However, you should be aware that detection by user agents may lead to mistakes because new smartphones are launched to the market every day, and it is impossible to include every model in the list of user-agent strings. So the chances are high that soon your list will become obsolete, as well as the mobile version of your website. Moreover, it can be extremely hard to find the right user-agent string for a smartphone that has just been released until it gains some popularity. And wasting your precious time inevitably results in missing out on valuable traffic.

Mobile URLs

Mobile websites are natively designed for smartphones

What is Next?

Contact our mobile website developers to see into your business need and advice you on the best smartphone strategy to implement.