Do you run a website or blog ? If yes, how accessible is it on a mobile device ? Now a days, with more and more people browsing the net straight from their mobile devices like cell phones, it is very important to make your website as accessible to this group of users. Google teaches you how.
Steps to make your website mobile friendly
The following are the steps you need to take to make your website easily accessible on cell phones and other mobile devices.
- Provide an obvious link to the mobile version of your website from the desktop version of your site.
- Use a conventional "mobile URL" and advertise it. Eg: Gmail uses the m.gmail.com URL to provide the mobile version of Gmail.
- Your mobile version of website should have a mobile friendly web design and should provide large, actionable, clickable UI elements.
- Mobile phones can be broadly classified into different categories - depending upon the degree of internet connectivity they support. Design your mobile friendly website for all these categories.
- Reduce the number of requests and the amount of data transferred.
- Sprite your images using CSS or transfer your images using a data URI scheme.
- Consolidate all your page's dependencies like CSS code, JavaScript and so on into a single file.
- Compress your HTML code where ever possible.
- Eliminate redirects.
- Transfer data when needed and preload where appropriate.
- Take advantage of new features in HTML.
- Use an application cache for local content storage.
- Use CSS3 instead of images where ever possible.
- Plan for the lowest common denominator. For example, Flash is not widely supported by many mobile devices. Dito for JavaScript. So these are best left out from your mobile friendly website design.
- Last but not the least, extensively test your mobile friendly website on multiple devices - which includes, actual devices like iPhone, Windows mobile and mobile simulators like Blackberry simulator, Opera Mini simulator, Android Emulator and so on.
[Source :
Google]
