Mobile Friendly Website Templates

Written on 7/11/2008 07:36:00 AM by poison_ivy

More and more mobile phones are being equipped with XHTML browsers and the ability to surf the web. Though surfing the web on your mobile phone isn’t the same as surfing the web on your desktop computer, since mobile web browsers are continually being smart, more people will have access to the Internet ANYTIME and ANYWHERE.

With that said, is your website mobile friendly? Some bigger websites, in order to cater to mobile phone surfers, are making a separate website for them. Sites such as YouTube already have a mobile friendly site and so does Google. Since some can’t afford to have separate content for mobile phone users, webmasters are just using simple HTML codes in order to make their websites more pleasing to look at when being rendered on a mobile phone browser.

A mobile phone browser views a website differently than standard desktop browsers. A site that shows three columns may only show one column on mobile phone browsers. Plus additional codes such as flash, java, CSS, etc, are harder to read and requires browser compatibility or additional plug-ins. However, since more java based web browsers such as Opera Mini and NetFront Browser are getting smarter, you only need to do a little work on your site. Opera Mini and NetFront Browser uses a server so that websites would load much faster and users can have a more pleasing desktop browsing experience.

I think the most basic thing you should do in order to make your website more mobile friendly is to start with your website templates. The more basic your site template is, the faster it will load on a mobile phone and the greater the chances are that users would extend their visit on your site.

Don’t use too much flash-based website templates since only few mobile browsers support flash. Even the most advanced of mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile and Safari Browser offers only a little flash support. By “little” I mean, they are not yet compatible with sites made with the latest version of Adobe Flash.

Free website templates are in abundance on the Internet. In fact, on dreamtemplate.com alone, they already have thousands of website templates on their database. The key is just finding the perfect template that matches the overall theme of your website and yet it is simple enough with less clutter and simple images so that both mobile browsers and desktop browsers would render it and load it fast enough so that the end users can quickly browse what you have to offer.

*links in italics are sponsored links.

Posted in Other Resources |