Mobile Web Development – The Future

A website needs to be more than ‘available on mobile’ to be really considered mobile friendly. Today’s contemporary mobile design is quickly moving towards giving the website a ‘native feel’ on the smartphone or tablet. This means that these websites offer the user a similar experience as an app which has been installed on their phones. Together with the help of the new-age mobile operating systems like the Apple iOS7 and Google’s Android 5.0 ‘Lollipop’, top website development firms – http://nywebdevelopment.com/ all around the world are part of a collaborative effort to blur the lines between native apps and the Internet.

Off-Canvas Flyouts

Areas of a webpage which remain hidden until the user clicks on them are called ‘Off-Canvas Flyouts’. Such a layout was first used in desktop applications but gradually moved to desktop websites, mobile applications and finally to mobile websites. While a large number of developers employ this layout simply to hide static content such as menus, there is also a more creative bunch, which uses them to display dynamic content too. This is useful in fitting more dynamic content on your page without making it look cluttered or confusing.

Pinch to Zoom

While pinch to zoom is not a very new concept, not everyone has mastered the use of this technique to its full potential. A developer needs to be very clear where on the website is pinch to zoom acceptable and where it is not. For instance if the text on your website requires pinch to zoom, it serves no purpose. The website should be responsive enough to align the text and adapt its size as per the screen size. However, images are a whole different ball game. While the text will have an optimum size for comfortable reading, users might want to enlarge images to see more detail. This requires the pinch to zoom feature to be enabled in image galleries on the website. Make sure it is implemented properly and for the right web elements as pinch to zoom can take a bite out of the mobile device’s processing speed.

One Finger Navigation

Smart website development firms make sure that websites of their creation can be navigated through a single finger (usually the index finger or the thumb, depending on the user’s preference). A making a website navigable with one hand ensures that users can visit, browse and use the website’s services and make purchases on the go. If at any point the user needs to use two hands, for example to pinch to zoom the text on the website, then it starts hindering the ‘portability’ of the website from the desktop screen to the users’ hands. Another aspect of this feature is that the targets on the screen should be large enough for the user to click on using their fingers since most users these days are browsing the internet through their touch-screen smartphones and tablets. ‘Mobile Friendly’ websites sometimes simply resize the webpage to fit the screen, without taking into account how the user would navigate along the miniature elements on a much smaller screen than a PC or laptop monitor. This is a very bad idea and usually ends in a disaster.

Simple Design

An attractive design is not the same thing as stuffing the website with every kind of feature and design technique one can think of. Website development firms often work better than private developers since they have the additional advantage of the cumulative experience of their entire team. This helps them to brainstorm the best and most suitable elements which work would best for a particular website, depending on its target audience, geographical location and the owner’s budget.

 Author Bio:

Marta is a tech-blogger with several years of experience in reviewing and writing about the latest trends in internet based services. She lives with her mother and 3 cats and loves to travel all around the world in search of website development firms doing cutting-edge research in her field.