Mobile Website Design Principles: Part 1 – Assessing Your Audience

With the number of users browsing the web from a mobile device steadily increasing, most mobile websites are still below standards. Many web developers just don’t understand how easy it is to create a good web experience for users of mobile devices. Mobile website design is steadily becoming a must-have skill for many small businesses. The first, and most important step, is to assess your target audience to see what the purpose of your mobile website should be.

There are three groups of visitors that use mobile web applications. Let’s look at them in detail:

Casual surfers act similarly to customers of traditional websites in that they aren’t really interested in one thing. They may just have a few spare minutes in between tasks and decide to take a look around. Since these users may only see your site for a few moments, your goal should be to make your content memorable so that they come back for more. Aim for small chunks that are just enough to keep them visited, but not so long that they can’t browse the entire site in one visit.

Repeat visitors are constantly returning for some sort of specific data. Since the interface of a mobile device is limited, avoid burying the content your customers want behind a few clicks. Try to keep your most viewed content at the top of the site.

The last group of visitors is the urgent ones. Depending on the business of your site, you may have a customer need some information or product as quickly as possible. By identifying the most important needs of these users and making that content available in the shortest amount of time, you’ll increase the usefulness of your site and keep these kinds of visitors around.

While you are building the website mobile version, you need to decide on a domain name. You will also need to work out how to advertise its existence. There are several options for choosing a mobile domain. You can use a separate domain name altogether, such as http://www.yoursite-mobile.com, use a subdomain, such as http://mobile.yoursite.com, or even use the .mobi extension, such as http://yoursite.mobi.

By finding out who your audience will be, you will be able to develop and market a mobile website to best match their needs.

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