Mobile Websites by Happy Hound
Most people just assume that a website will work on platforms, but it's actually a lot more complicated than that! Websites are generally designed with a desktop computer in mind, and as such the layout is decided upon with the size of standard monitor as the key consideration. But take this website and load it into a widescreen laptop, a 50inch TV screen, an tablet such as an iPad (either vertical or horizontal), or most commonly, a mobile phone, and this layout will fail.
Different Size Screens
Take for example a website with a colourful header and background - like this pretty little site you are viewing right now! If you are on a widescreen laptop you will notice that the purple fence and green grass run all the way to the edge of the screen, and that the main content of the website is nicely centred. If we hadn't taken the time to consider your widescreen monitor, you would get nasty whitespace all the way to the edge. But, if you then shrink the screen down to an iPad everything will fit snuggly onto the screen.
The Mobile World
Go back only a few years and accessing the internet on a mobile phone was a slow and dissatisfying experience, but now roughly 15% of all website traffic in the UK comes from a mobile phone (tecmark, June 2011). And with the advancements of smartphones, users have quick mobile internet and expect to get a good website experience.
But if your website isn't prepared for the mobile web the phone browser will shrink everything down to fit on the screen. This will mean hard to read text, out of proportion images, and badly laid out design.
The solution? Get Happy Hound Web Design to make your website know when it is being accessed from a mobile and change it's layout accordingly. The great extra bonus here? You can change what is displayed to the user. For example, a chain of shops might have a mountain of information and images on their normal website, but for mobile, the most important thing is to show what they sell, and find the nearest shop. So A mobile compatible website can remove all the added information and just simple say, "Hey, we are a cool shop, this is what we sell, and this is where we are!". And the website will find the users location and tell them the nearest store. Clever aye?
You will see what we mean from this example to the left, our very own website!
Before we made the website compatible with mobile devices, everything was shrunk down to fit on the screen. This meant to be able to read the text you would need to zoom in, which would mean missing most of the content out. Without zooming, you could not make out the words, and would need to scroll three full pages to get the the bottom of the website.
Now, we have everything neatly organised with a different opening menu and cool transitions between pages. Only what you need to know is on the mobile site. Perfect.
