Mobile Websites: What's the Best Way to Optimize a Website

We've had a lot of client inquiries recently about "mobile websites". Clients want to make sure that their websites look neat and sweet on all mobile devices, and we feel that it is a MUST for contemporary web design.

There are number of ways to ensure that a website looks nice and proper on mobile devices, but we prefer to listen to uncle Google. And here is what uncle Google recommends:

Details of recommendations

Google calls mobile websites "responsive websites" and supports smartphone-optimized sites in three configurations:

1. Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device. This is Google's recommended configuration.
2. Sites that dynamically serve all devices on the same set of URLs, but each URL serves different HTML (and CSS) depending on whether the user agent is a desktop or a mobile device.
3. Sites that have separate mobile and desktop URLs.

In other words, instead of setting up a separate subdomain with "m.mysite.com" - follow Google's guidelines on how to use CSS media queries to optimize your website's code for mobile devices. You will have only one website but it will look different on desktop browsers and mobile devices browsers.

In fact, Google's recommendation has been our preference right form the start, but some clients feel it is a fancier way to have a separate website which will be optimized specifically for mobile devices. Well, when you take into consideration that you would need to maintain this separate website separately, this option becomes less attractive. But once you put Google's weight behind your advice then clients usually accept it without hesitation.

And if you need my help, contact me via my Ottawa website design site.