Web Redesign to Accommodate Mobile Dominance

For some businesses, mobile represents a significant portion of their traffic. If your business falls under this category, then you probably understand how important mobile web design is to your success. Mobile is getting more profitable and more business owners are seeing the value in investing into this area. Redesign is a logical course of action if your aim is to dominate the mobile search results and tie your customers into your mobile channel.

To start off, you have to option between setting up a separate mobile website and a responsive site. If search engine optimization (SEO) is a channel that is being pursued, then responsive design is the way to go. The reason why is because responsive design allows for you to serve both desktop and mobile users with one website. Since one website is being used, the content and links being created will double in their value. It also becomes easier to market and manage one website versus two.

With that said, mobile web design requires a big investment of time, effort and money (depending on the size of your website). You will need to make sure that your content is presented properly on mobile devices, create a mobile website layout, optimize your images, and work on your user interface. Setting up for mobile dominance requires a lot of preparation and is something you need to take time to plan out.

You’ll need to experiment with different layouts to see which one best represents your original website in a mobile format. The UI will need a complete overhaul, especially if your navigation contains many categories. Some companies went with a pull out tab as their navigation menu because a listed menu hurt the user experience (due to excessive scrolling). Companies have ignored compressing their original images only to have users complain about loading time. Many responsive sites have forgotten that mobile devices download slower than desktop PCs.

Once these elements of redesign are completed, it’s imperative that you move on to conversion optimization for your pages. You cannot ignore the fact that mobile websites will display your pages differently from your main website. You’ll have to revisit your pages to add more line breaks in your copy/content for readability, resize your images, and update the text formatting. The shopping cart will also need to be revisited to confirm that they are compatible with mobile browsers.

As you can see, there’s a lot of work involved if your goal is to get serious about mobile. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Many businesses are reporting healthy ROIs as a result of investing in mobile and particularly responsive redesign. Obviously, it will be far easier to jump into the redesign and new channel if you have a small to medium sized website. But even if you do have a larger website and need to spend more, the switch will be worth the investment over the long term.