Website design fascinates me. Countless lines of what seem like gibberish tell your site what the structure it will take, what your font and line spacing will be, what database images should be pulled from and if they should rotate with other images or not.
Great design is what got me into advertising in the first place – so, combine the creative process with watching the site come to life through coding, and I get really excited. Dorky, I know. And who knew I’d end up on the account side of the business instead of as a designer, which is what I originally imagined.
As cool as the development process is, for websites there are a lot of things that designers and programmers need to take into consideration as they work. In addition to making sure your website is compatible across multiple browsers – it’s critical that your site also be mobile friendly.
Nearly two billion people , or roughly 28.7% of the world population, are on the internet. In America specifically, 25% of our population access the Internet ONLY through their mobile device. Morgan Stanley analysts see a dramatic shift to the mobile web and, at the current rate of adoption, predict the mobile web will eclipse the desktop Internet by as early as 2014.
According to research from mobiThinking, the most popular activities today on the mobile Web are mobile search, reading news and sports information, downloading music and videos and email and instant messaging. In the not-to-distant future (and already happening in China and Japan) the key drivers will be money transfer, location-based services, m-health and m-payment.
Got your attention yet? The place to start is testing your own website for mobile compatibility.
Some of the tools we like include TestiPhone, iPhoney and MobiReady, which will mock-up what your site will look like on a mobile device and do allow you to do some compatibility tests. One of the coolest and most comprehensive tools we found is the Gomez Cross-Device Compatibility Test. Think your site is mobile compatible? Go test it today!
If you’re a WordPress user, you’re in luck, as there’s a super plugin that you can use that makes it all so easy. Yet another reason we do so love WordPress.
What are tools you use to check your site’s mobile device compatibility? And, if you’re not yet thinking about testing your site, let this be the jump start that you need!
