3 Simple Ways to Make Your Blog Mobile Friendly and Improve User Experience

September 26, 2012 by Daniel Sharkov|

Following is a guest post by Celina Conner. Celina will walk us through three ways to improve the way our blogs look on mobile devices. Enjoy!

Fast to gain its lion share is the mobile market. Almost everyone today browses profiles and engages in personal, casual or business talks in Facebook, Twitter and other social networks using smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.

As people go increasingly mobile, creating a mobile-friendly version of your blog is essential.

Question is, “Are your website design and content ready for mobile devices?” Surely, you don’t want your readers to feel frustrated or cramped after viewing your site and read your content.
In this article, we will talk about three things that you can do to make your blog mobile-friendly.

Why Adapt to Mobile in the First Place

The fact is that people nowadays are walking around with “computers” on their pockets. If you are a business owner or an individual who wants to promote your brand online, having a website accessible through the web is not enough. You need a website that has a mobile-friendly environment, to cater for your viewers’ pleasurable experience.

This mobile equivalent of your website is not one that is the same as the original web version
but is a light version of your main blog. Those traditional web designs are made specifically for laptop and desktop computers. A mobile website requires more user-friendliness in terms of navigation and display of items.

Remember – users have to pinch, zoom and scroll in to view the items on the page in smaller screens with convenience.

How to Make Your Website Mobile-friendly? 1. Use Smaller Images or Cut Back on Images

With mobile devices, your site will be viewed on smaller screens with slower or lower bandwidth. Your ultimate goal is to still grab your reader’s attention at once. But how do you make this happen without compromising on the lead time to load heavy graphics? You should have high-resolution pictures only resized smaller—and limited to one to two per post. These should be enough to make your post compelling to be read. Your text should make the user experience worthwhile; the images are just there to fuel their understanding better and not to distract them from digesting the content or material on your web page.

Now if your website cannot stand on its own and live harmoniously without having such large-sized images, then make sure that you upload them with JPEG, PNG or GIF as these file formats take lesser time to load. Also, be reminded not to put pop-up images or Flash-based elements as these will block off the user’s concentration and will more likely just annoy them.

2. Place Larger Call-to-action Buttons

Buttons should have a high periodization. Imagine having to press on small site buttons on tiny-sized screens with descriptive text that sets no clear expectations from the user.

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If you’re the mobile user, you most probably will leave the website no matter how cool the design and great the content is.

Well-spaced and larger buttons are your safest best when it comes to optimizing your site to be mobile-friendly. Remember, content (textual or graphical display) is only good for seeing and learning. But buttons are ones that give you the conversion rates! People click on buttons to close a sale, to pay, to navigate and work around the website.

3. Jive with the Plugin Approach

If your blog is running on the WordPress platform, you can utilize many of its available plugins which can help you transform your blog into a mobile-friendly site quite instantly. Some recommended plugins or applications that you can install for free are Mobify, WPTap, and the WordPress Mobile Pack. They are compatible for BlackBerry, iPhone, Samsung tablets and other common devices out there in the market.

With Mobify, you can utilize a JavaScript framework to automatically resize images and load mobile content with greater acceleration to offer just the convenience your viewers need. Play around with WPTapwhich have themes consisting in elegant slideshow and thumbnail images that make it an ideal choice for showcasing your products. WordPress Mobile Packis a set package that already includes a mobile switcher that allows users to select mobile themes according to their personal style, easy addition of extra widgets and device adaptation.

With these simple WordPress plugins, you can customize your blog themes, layouts, responsive images and other branding elements to enhance its usability for an improved quality of user experience. You can also try browsing for premium packages. Sure, they may come with a cost but they will be worth the price when your users appreciate your website and boost your sales.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that mobile technology now is getting real big. You can experiment and follow other several ways to make your website mobile-friendly. These are only a few that you can start with. The key is to have smart navigation and practice good design with good visuals, to stay on top of the competition.

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