In case you didn’t get the memo, mobile Internet traffic surpassed desktop traffic for the first time ever last year. This means more people use their smartphones, tablets and wearable devices to access the Internet than traditional desktops and laptops. Bloggers who fail to cater to the ever-growing demographic of mobile Internet users are placing themselves at a serious disadvantage. So, how do you create a mobile-friendly blog?
There are three different configurations for creating mobile-friendly blogs. The first uses a separate mobile domain. Ever visit a website on your smartphone and notice the domain name is different? It’s not uncommon for high-traffic websites and blogs to use a “mobi.site.com” domain structure for mobile traffic. Desktop users are sent to site.com, but mobile users are sent to mobi.site.com. Unfortunately, using a separate mobile domain name can create problems: it requires extra maintenance/upkeep, there’s a greater risk for duplicate content problems, and search engines may have trouble crawling and indexing your pages.
A second option is to dynamically serve your blog’s HTML based on the user’s web browser agent. Technical jargon aside, your blog would have two different types of HTML: one for desktop users and another for mobile users. When visitors access your website, your site’s server checks their web browser to determine from which device they are accessing your site. Using this information, your server will either send the desktop or mobile HTML.
The third option for creating a mobile-friendly blog uses Responsive Web Design (RWD). It uses proportion grids and CSS3 media queries to create web designs that load and function across all devices. Regardless of which device visitors use, they will have the same experience on a Responsive website. This is the only configuration that’s recommended by Google.
Google described Responsive Web Design as, “Serves the same HTML code on the same URL regardless of the users’ device (desktop, tablet, mobile, non-visual browser), but can render the display differently (i.e., respond) based on the screen size. Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern,” wrote Google on its Developers website.
Is your blog or website mobile-friendly? Let us know in the comments section below!
For many bloggers their blog is their home base so having a mobile friendly website is of the utmost importance.
With different mobile phones and tablets , each with their own user expectations, it reminds me of the early 2000’s . At that point, the different browsers generally rendered web pages differently when certain HTML markup elements were used – necessary ones, I might add.
I am happy to hear that WordPress is one of the more mobile-friendly blog creators out there right now. I’ve just started using and I am a much bigger fan of it than I am Blogger.