Organization Partner

Keeping in mind those trips between browser and website, think of it like this: packing for your main website is like packing a steamer trunk for a cruise. There’s lots of room for everything, including some luxuries and extras, and you don’t have to worry how heavy it may be. Packing for mobile is like backpacking. You need all the essential equipment, but everything has to be smaller, some items do double duty, nothing extra is allowed, and everything has to fit nicely together.

The good news is that on the mobile Web, user expectations of content are likely more modest. They are typically more focused on a task – finding an address, getting a price, seeing a product, buying a single item – rather than the more leisurely browsing or immersive experience they might be looking for on a desktop or laptop. So from the start, mobile content can be pared down without compromising likely use cases, so you can already be ahead of the game simply by selectively choosing content for mobile.

Even with carefully selected content, how that content and the page itself are structured makes all the difference in response time and hence, user satisfaction. Every page has to be lean and fit. Here are a number of fundamental guidelines to make sure every page on your mobile site is performing its best:

Make sure everything on the page is essential. Minimize the overall number of page objects – scrutinize every image, every piece of JavaScript, CSS, tracking tokens, etc. Eliminate, combine, or compress wherever possible.

Mind your images. Remember, users are looking at your site on a screen that’s the size of a playing card. Smaller, lower-resolution images are perfectly acceptable. It may be more work to re-do images for mobile, but every byte, every millisecond counts. Read the rest of this entry »