Why Is Navigation On A Mobile Device A Headache?

By Author: Michael Bartlett
Total Articles: 8
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The internet is everywhere these days. It can be cheaply and easily accessed at any time and more or less anywhere that has mobile phone network coverage. Smart phones and tablets are becoming more and more ubiquitous and the latest projections by eMarketer predict that 65.8% of the UK population will be using a smartphone by 2017. So what does this mean for businesses with a web presence or start-ups thinking about the sort of website they need?
Firstly, mobile phones have tiny screens compared to desk top and laptop computers. Pictures and graphics take time to load and can use up too many pixels for the user to see anything else. Users will click away from a site that takes too long to load or only shows irrelevant images and go to a site that downloads the content they want to see quickly. Prose should be to the point and as brief as possible while remaining engaging and informative. Unnecessary links should be removed and any features that will take up pixels and bandwidth should be left out. Prose should be single column so that users don’t need to zoom in on text to be able to read it. Even generously sized screens ...
... such as that of the iPhone can’t show a readable full page website. Make sure that the columns fill the screen width and expand downwards rather than across. Scrolling up and down is far easier for the mobile device user than scrolling across the screen.
Navigation on a mobile device is a particular headache. Users need to be able to move around a website, but scrolling through endless links and navigation bars to get to the content is irritating and time consuming. There are many ways to overcome unwieldy navigation links, but the easiest is probably to have the full navigation on the homepage and have the content on other pages that can be accessed via a search or navigation link. These secondary pages can have the navigation links at the bottom, with a single anchor link at the top for ease of access.
Of course a site can be brilliantly designed for mobile phones, but if only the latest smartphones can access it then you could be missing out on a significant chunk of business. There are so many different phone models available that it can make sense for some businesses to have two or more levels of mobile friendly websites – one for the smartest of the smartphones and one for everyone else. Facebook, arguably one of the most innovative and trend-setting companies of the moment, has three different versions of mobile friendly website, as well as its standard website, to make sure that it can be accessed by as many users as possible.
This is where it makes sense to employ a reputable web design company that is up to speed on designing Mobile-Friendly Websites. Time and money can be saved by using a company with the necessary experience and knowledge to quickly and effectively create the kind of websites that can be accessed easily by mobile device users. My Web Designer is an application developer and mobile application design company based in Birmingham. We have the necessary expertise to create mobile friendly websites and our application developers are innovative and enthusiastic. For more information on our mobile friendly websites and mobile application design in Birmingham please contact us.