Update Your Website : Avoid Elements That Frustrate Mobile Users

If you depend upon the Internet for business purposes, there's a good chance that you already have a mobile device. Mobile device usage has skyrocketed as the devices themselves have become more powerful, more flexible and people have begun to use them for the types of tasks that they used to perform only on their desktop computers. When you're planning to update your website, you want to make certain that you avoid some of the common pitfalls that make mobile sites very frustrating for users.

Size

Mobile devices come with screens in many different sizes, but human beings, for the most part, are similar in size from one to the next. This means that just about everybody's fingers take up a certain amount of room on their mobile device's screens when they try to navigate a webpage. Generally speaking, any navigation link on your site should be between 30 and 40 pixels in size.  Keep this in mind when you update your website.Small navigation links – or other types of links – are intensely frustrating for mobile users. If you haven't experienced this frustration for yourself, open the normal version of a website on your mobile device and try to tap on a link with your finger. You'll find that, not only will you tend to hit the wrong link, you'll have a hard time figuring out exactly where your finger actually presses onto the screen. When you update your website, adding navigation elements that are adequately sized can make your site much easier for your users to navigate and will encourage them to explore your site further.

No Regular Option

The sites designed for mobile devices are typically streamlined versions of a regular website. Sometimes, your users will prefer to access your regular website over your mobile website. Be sure you give them an option to do so on your site.While most smartphones will have very small screens on them that make the mobile versions of websites much more useful than the full-sized versions, some devices – such as the iPad – have screens that are large enough to allow people to choose between the mobile version or regular version of a website. Not having that choice can be frustrating, particularly if you need to access something that is more easily available on the regular version of the site.

Big Pictures

One of the things you might want to discuss with your web designer when you update your website and you're having your mobile site crafted is reducing the sizes of some of the images that are displayed on your site. If a mobile device user has a small screen and you have very large images, you can create a situation where they cannot see the entire image and, to make it worse, where they cannot manipulate the image enough to get to the button that closes it out so that they can return to your site.This holds true for gallery features, as well. When you are ready to update your website and have a mobile site constructed, be sure that any of the enhancements are designed to be easy to use on mobile devices so that you do not frustrate your users.

Consulting Designers

A good website designer will be able to give you quite a few different options in terms of mobile site design when you update your website. Mobile devices are likely to become increasingly important in the future. Already, people are using mobile devices to go Internet shopping, pay bills and take care of other tasks. If you have specific needs out of your site – such as making it easy for visitors to fill out forms, make purchases and so forth – be sure to talk to your designer about how you go about accomplishing those goals when you update your website without creating a site that isn't as friendly as it should be to mobile users.