​Is your website or blog mobile-friendly?

​ It is now absolutely essential to have a mobile-friendly website or blog if you intend people to access it without difficulty.
It's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL  to get to grips with what's involved in being mobile-friendly now that:
  • More than 50% of browsing for art takes place on mobile devices.
  • Google has decided to rank sites by how mobile-friendly they are.
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This page covers:
  • The Mobile Friendly Checklist
  • Prioritising for Mobile Devices
  • Responsive Templates
  • More readings about being mobile-friendly

Two tools to test mobile-friendliness

The two main search engines both have a tool to test out whether or not a website or blog is mobile friendly.  

I recommend you use both as I find they give slightly different results.
This is what this website looks like ​on the Google Mobile-Friendly Test

The Mobile Friendly Check List

Accessible
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Technically efficient and effective
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Is it easy to navigate using a mobile device?
  • Can you find the main menu easily?
  • Are the options all available or is the list truncated?

Can you read the text easily?
  • without changing the magnification?
  • in bright sunshine?
  • Is the font size appropriate?
  • Is there a good contrast between the colour of the font and the background?

Is scrolling easy?
  • Do you have to scroll horizontally (bad)
  • or is all scrolling limited to vertical (i.e. OK)?
Does the content resize to the size of the viewable screen?
  • Is your website using a responsive template?

Does it load quickly using mobile broadband?

Is it compatible with all devices?
  • For example is it read easily by iPads and iPhones (which do NOT use Flash) as well as tablets and Android smart phones?
  • Can browsers and search engines crawl and read all the code on the page?

Do URLs and html stay the same?

Does it pass the Google Mobile-Friendly Test?
  • check whether or not your website is regarded as mobile friendly by using a test developed by Google

Prioritising for mobile devices
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Responsive templates
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It's essential that a website works well on a mobile device for the customer. That means:
  • you can read the context easily
  • you can access the navigation easily
  • you can perform basic and important actions easily

Google recommends that you Optimize your entire site for mobile devices.  Google now ranks websites accessed via mobile devices by whether or not the website has been optimised for a mobile experience. If you've not updated your website will not rank well for mobile devices.

Mobile devices are now the technology of choice for many people browsing websites.
  • lots of people have switched to mobile devices for browsing (and the numbers are increasing exponentially every quarter). Hence you need to deliver a good experience on every type of mobile device both tablets and smartphones.
  • Over 50% of traffic to retail sites now comes from mobile devices.
  • Failure to rework a website so that it is compatible with mobile devices can mean that traffic reduces over time.
Responsive templates enable a web design to resize automatically for any screen size. Plus when using a responsive web design:
  • the html stays the same
  • the URLs for each page stay the same (i.e. no 'mobile version' URLs)
If your site is NOT mobile friendly it will be difficult if not impossible to read easily on a mobile device.
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Google recommends responsive web design and provides some excellent advice about:
  • Principles of Site Design - this covers home page and site navigation and usability plus tips for those wanting to include e-commerce on their website
In my blog post Companies who can resize your website for different screen sizes I detail a list of companies that Google is highlighting as approved multi-screen vendors.

More about being mobile-friendly
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Google

Getting Started - includes tips on:
  • top 3 things to know when building mobile websites
  • top 3 mistakes to avoid

Bing