Make Your Own Mobile-Friendly Blog from Scratch

The use of internet on mobile devices has increased vastly over the past few years. Today, traffic from mobile devices is just under 30 percent. Therefore, you need to ensure that your website is mobile friendly. This is the only way you can get ahead of your competition; especially considering that Google and other search engines are planning on pushing down websites that are not mobile friendly.

To choose the best approach for handling your mobile traffic, therefore, you need to consider a couple of things.

a) Learn how to choose the right approach for designing your mobile friendly website

 

b) Design your mobile friendly site

 

c) Consider the development of your website

 

d) Think about technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

e) Set up and use Analytics

 

So, how do you set up your mobile friendly blog? Read on to learn more:

1. Selecting the Right Approach

There are a number of approaches you can fall back upon to ensure that your web presence is mobile – friendly. Basically, there are 3 main approaches, each of which will provide your mobile users with different experiences. These include, but are not limited to:

 

a) Responsive Websites

 

The page on a responsive website will remain the same (including the images, HTML, URL, and everything else). However, the CSS will give different rules, depending on the browser.

 

b) Dynamic/ Adaptive/ RESS Service

Here, the URL does not change. However, the server will send different CSS and HTML based on the type of device being used to request the page.

 

c) Separate Mobile Website

 

This is typically hosted on a sub domain or a sub-folder. However, the website can still use the same URL as the desktop site and just serve different HTML (typically referred to as dynamic serving) to mobile and desktop visitors, depending on the user agent. 

If your mobile website uses different URLs, then it is likely these URLs will be kept parallel to the desktop counterparts. This will allow for smoother redirects based on the user agents. However, since the pages are separate, then you will have unlimited options. This means that you can choose different website structures, meaning that the mobile URLs will have to be different. 

Still, you need to keep in mind that choosing an approach is the beginning of the process of learning how to start up a blog that is mobile friendly. You still need to develop the website and monitor it once it goes live. These guidelines will enable you design, develop, build and monitor a website that is the best version for search engines and users alike.

2. Designing a Mobile Friendly Website 

Mobile users want to see website versions that have content, themes, colors and text that resemble those on our main desktop version website. However, you can still ensure that the screen only displays one or two elements at any given time, instead of all of the options available on your desktop website. 

Organizing Web Content

To organize the content for your website, do the following:

a) Give Mobile First Priority

The basic idea behind mobile websites is that you should first design the mobile friendly website before designing the desktop version by expanding the pages. Keep in mind that nothing you put on your mobile web pages will fail to load on your desktop site versions. Use this approach for dynamically served and responsive websites to ensure that your mobile site has content that is identical to that on your desktop sites. 

b) Designing Mobile Websites Second

If the MOBILE FIRST option does not work, then you need to design the desktop versions first. Figure out those elements on your desktop pages that should be included on your mobile site. You can do this by gathering user data using standard tools and web analytic tools. In the process, decide on the content that is most important to your visitors, the content that is typically ignored and the path that visitors take typically. 

Then, choose whether to leave the ads on your website intact based on user tests. However, if your website runs primarily on subscriptions, then you may need to eliminate the ads from your mobile website version. This will speed up your pages, and optimize the user experience.

After that, you should map out that content that path visitors usually take on the website pages. This should be simple if you have article pages and more complex for product and category pages. 

Once you understand the visual flow, lay the initial designs first for mobile screens before getting into the small details of your mobile website design. 

In conclusion, keep in mind that it is easy to design website that are friendly for mobile traffic. You can either do this on your own or get a professional website design and development professional to do the work on your behalf.