Planning Visitor Friendly Mobile Phone Web Pages
Web pages suitable for viewing on a mobile phone can be a challenge for the developers of these pages now that more and more phones are being used to view them. Mobile web design needs to overcome the obvious screen size problem by using designs that are easy to read. Now that many limitations on the location of a phone have been removed because of better radio transmissions, bigger memory and fast CPU chips, online data can now be accessed with greater ease from a mobile device.
Anyone who has access to the Internet from a personal computer in their home, now has the same capability from their portable phone or PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) during the journey from home to work and back. Designers should be aware that content created for the big screen may not necessarily read well on a small screen.
Most of today’s web pages have been written and tested on the wide color monitors attached to desktop PC’s. Despite the fact that the modern mobile phone has seen great technological advances, their screens have remained fairly small, which places a limit on how much they can display. More thought is therefore required on how to design web pages for viewing on mobile phones.
Some of the factors to be considered for a mobile website are: the amount of color information (16 or 32 bit), slower text input, the lack of a pointing device which limits user interaction, many portable devices can only scroll vertically, the devices often use soft keys for commands, data transfer is slower, data storage is limited and each packet of data transferred has to be paid for.
To add to this, users of mobile devices prefer using short URL’s which require less typing. Longer text links are acceptable as they can be seen easily and are easy to select. Avoid placing navigation controls at the top of the page. Don’t fill the screen with many different sizes and styles of text and do not overuse underlining and italics.
Make use of small images on the page. The phone is able to zoom in on images but keeping them small saves on the time taken to download them. Displaying large images can draw attention away from the message that is being delivered. Large images should not be placed at the top of a page as it is tedious to wait while they download before any data that is informative can arrive.
The design characteristics of mobile web pages have been examined by this article. The following is a summary of the findings. Readability is a primary objective for a small screen. Choose colors, fonts and alignment very carefully. The order of the document should be well thought out, and last but not least, use images that are suitable for displaying on small screens.
