It was not so long ago that the idea of using the Internet on your phone seemed a little farfetched. Even phones that did include some form of internet connection only appeared to include it as a gimmick: connection speeds were too slow and web page renderings were a poor imitation of their desktop counterparts. Due to slow data connections like GPRS many websites adopted a separate "mobile version" of their domain for people visiting from phones.

With the emergence of LTE and larger phone screens a great number of phone users are moving away from these mobile websites in favour of viewing the full desktop version on their phones. While most websites do not bother producing a mobile version most do not even give any consideration to users visiting from a mobile device whatsoever.

This is a big mistake. Smartphone ownership is growing at an almost exponential rate, and an increasing number of people are spending more time online with their phones than a desktop or laptop computer. Smartphone users are also far more likely to spend money or click adverts while they are online than their desktop counterparts. There are already a great number of websites that derive the majority of their traffic from smartphone users, but many of these websites are also designed primarily with desktop users in mind with little consideration given to smartphone traffic.


Screen Sizes

There are a number of obvious differences between smartphones and desktop computers. While a computer may have a screen in the region of 15 to 24 inches or even larger, most smartphones fall into the 3 to 5 inch size range. Needless to say, this can make viewing content much more difficult on a smartphone. Text that is large and readable on a desktop computer can be too small to read when that web page is zoomed out to fit on a smaller screen.

Smartphone users can zoom in quite easily of course, but they need to be given a reason to want to do so. If a scaled down version of your website looks unappealing they may simply not bother, and browse away to some other destination instead. The content will need to be able to captivate them to draw them in closer.

For this reason, the use of high quality images is essential on any website. Images serve to make a website much more digestible than a text only page anyway, but poor quality images may not provide enough to entice users to stick around. Interesting, unique and artistic images can draw people's attention much more than a small, low quality image sourced from Google.

While images are the easiest way to grab attention, post headings may be the only text on your website that is readable when a smartphone user first loads your page. Employing catchy and intriguing titles is essential if you wish these visitors to continue reading and become regular visitors.


Touchscreens

Most smartphones today operate on a touch sensitive screen which by its nature is drastically different to a keyboard and mouse interface. Selecting things with precision is much harder with a fat finger on a smaller screen than it is with a pinpoint mouse cursor on a large display.

Many websites still use some form of navigational menu with a tightly grouped list of text items. Selecting the correct item from such a list using a touchscreen device can require several attempts, ultimately resulting in frustration for the user. Having a more spacious or a more visual navigational menu that employs images can be much more effective for touchscreen users and can be more visually appealing for desktop users too.

Using a text menu used to provide SEO benefits to a website by providing internal links with relevant keywords, but this is becoming less and less essential. Most search engines, particularly Google, place far less emphasis on these links than they used to. Replacing them with easy to select images will not harm the on-page SEO of a website as much as it would have done a few years ago and so you shouldn't be too concerned about discarding text menus in favour of a more user friendly design.


Mouse Over Effects

One other thing to consider about touchscreen devices is that they have no way to determine where a user is looking on the page. A number of visually impressive design features have been used in the past that make use of mouse over effects. For example, moving the mouse cursor over an image link can change it to an alternative image encouraging people to click.

These effects simply will not work on a touchscreen device. For example, having a scroll down menu appear from a navbar item while the mouse cursor is held over it means that touchscreen visitors will not be made aware of or be able to use this menu. While omitting these effects for the benefit of touchscreen users may result in the loss of some flamboyance for your website, a bigger concern should be that you may lose traffic if such mouse-over effects are used as an essential part of your website's navigation.


Flash





















It is a wonder why so many websites still use Adobe Flash. Even Adobe has announced it will stop supporting the platform in the near future as the online world moves towards other standards such as HTML5. The majority of smartphone traffic currently comes from iPhone users, and the iPhone famously does not support Adobe Flash. Even Google Android will soon drop support for Flash. Using Flash as the building block for your website will mean that much of its content will simply not be accessible for an increasing number of smartphone visitors. If Flash menus are used for picture galleries, navigational menus or even for product listings, you may be alienating a large number of potential readers / customers by adopting this out-dated platform. Even for users who do have Flash support the platform is buggy and prone to crashing on a frequent basis and can often detract from an otherwise good user experience.


Conclusion

Most elements of a website will work the same on a smartphone as they do on a desktop computer, and good design advice often applies equally to both. But the different nature by which smartphone users interact with their devices should be given serious consideration when designing your website, as these users are going to make up a larger proportion of your overall traffic as we enter into the "post-PC era". Google now famously designs its new products and services for smartphone users first, while desktop users are an afterthought. With more people using phones to browse online and these smartphone users being more likely to spend money, it makes sense to make them your top priority when designing your website.

Author Bio:
This was a guest post written by Simon from best-mobile-contracts.co.uk, a UK mobile comparison website. You can find out more about Best Mobile Contracts on Facebook.