A mobile website for London businesses is now a necessity, More people talk about mobile websites advantages and benefits these days. You will hear about – or perhaps even find out for yourself – that there are these new types of websites referred to as mobile friendly websites.

A mobile website is made up of HTML, holds content and images, and is accessed via the web. Sounds like a regular website, right? Well actually a mobile website generally works in conjunction with a regular website, but as a counterpart is a much smaller version and has a simpler layout. A mobile website’s main function is to serve up essential information on smart phones. Smart phones are those popular little devices that are actually rather advanced computers with multipurpose monitors built in. IPhones, Blackberries, and Androids are some of the most popular Smart phones that can, among many other functions – surf the web.

Therein lies the purpose of mobile websites. Because the screens are so much smaller on a smart phone, traditional websites are often more difficult to navigate, and the design or feel of that website has lost it’s initial purpose. In addition, many websites utilize programming such as flash or FLV videos which many phones have difficulty displaying properly.

Smartphones and Mobile Website

Mobile websites are scaled down versions in terms of size and content. In fact a mobile website is generally under 300 pixels wide, compared to traditional websites which can be 800 pixels and much larger. A mobile website’s navigation can also be easily accessed using a thumb or finger, as the buttons generally span the width of the phone.

As a scaled-down version of the main website, a mobile phone actually serves its purpose because most people accessing a mobile website will in fact be, mobile themselves. And you generally don’t visit a website or surf on your phone without a specific purpose in mind. Often that means finding phone numbers, location, hours of operation, e-mail addresses, services offered, contact names, product availability, etc. In that sense mobile websites are generally less on design, and focused much more on accessing that essential information.

Mobile Website Redirect Script

A mobile website is usually set up as a subdomain of the main website. So it’s URL would be something like m.webaddress.com, but just existing in that virtual space is not enough, because when a smart phone surfer goes to a website’s main URL, they won’t know that there’s a mobile version unless there is a link to the mobile version of that website. Or a more popular strategy is to use JavaScript or PHP encoding that detects a smart phone is calling up a website. The purpose of this is to redirect smart phone traffic directly to the mobile website. That speeds things up a lot for the user and chances are it’s what they wanted anyway. Most mobile sites however, will also offer the option for the user to go to the company’s main website via a regular HTML link. You don’t want to force your smart phone traffic to stay on the mobile website, because that should still be a matter of preference.

These are some of the major differences between a mobile website and a regular website, and in the coming months and years you’ll find that mobile websites will be a standard feature of most full websites due to the phenomenal growth of smart phone technology and usage.

Brixton Website Designers