As I browse the web on the go on my mobile devices, I see that mobile optimized sites are rapidly becoming standard. Or if not quite that yet, they’re far more widespread now than just a mere six months ago. More and more small businesses and news media who I didn’t expect to have quite yet optimized their sites for mobile have done it. Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised, as there are lots of tools available to enable people to create at least a half decent “mobile optimized” version of their already existing site.

It’s great, but there’s one simple yet utterly important feature I see missing on too many mobile site versions: a link to the full site. While it’s right to offer the mobile optimized version as the default front door when the user’s on a mobile device, the user may still want, or need, to access the full site. In the worst case, the limited content on the mobile site hasn’t been updated with the same info as the full site. I recently had to go to a company’s site to check the address of their new office, but the mobile site still had the old address. I had been to the full site before and knew they had the new address there, but as I was using my iPad the code on the site forced me to the mobile version with no access to the full site. And this was the site of a large digital agency. So I had no way to get their new address on the go.

My other recommendations for mobile site design, in a short summary, are these:
2.    Simplicity: single column layouts work best.
3.    Small and targeted: reduce the amount of content.
4.    Functional: present the navigation so it works on a mobile device; touch UI or not.
5.    Easy: minimize text entry and scrolling.
6.    Take advantage of inbuilt functionality: e.g. GPS/location aware, maps, make calls, save contacts.

Karri Ojanen