The biggest mistake that many website owners commit is to design a site for PC and then convert the contents into mobile version. This causes users to face difficulty, as the fonts do not fit the size of the screen most of the time. The best way to overcome this problem is to go for responsive web design that makes fonts of web pages compatible with the mobile devices. While creating mobile optimized sites, professionals of a responsive web design company take utmost care for displaying web pages, contents and buttons to offer suitable experience to mobile users.

Another option, which web development services deploy for attaining mobile design flexibility, is the usage of alternate layout. Adobe Muse helps in creating separate site for mobile visitors and redirects them according to screen resolution. The advantage of alternate layout to developers is superb design flexibility, control and ability of optimizing a mobile website for unique set of meta data and keywords.
Whether you want to go for responsive web design or develop an alternate layout for your website, you have to take some design considerations in to account, so that your site looks impressive as well as rank well during searches.

•    Avoid creating tiny buttons
•    Use scroll for making fonts legible
•    Avoid using rich contents and widgets
•    Ensure fast loading of pages
•    Use suitable cross links

Avoid Creating Tiny Buttons

While designing a mobile website, you have to create large buttons. This helps users in comfortably pressing buttons on your website with their fingers. Do not place buttons closely each other or else a user will hit wrong one. For safe usage, you have to build sizes in 50px by 50px format. For spacing, follow 20px – 32px format.

Use Scroll for Making Fonts Legible

Mobile users are always in hurry and many mobile websites are devoid of zooming facilities. As tiny texts are difficult to read, you have to take advantage of mobile users’ ability of scrolling and develop long pages with contents displayed in comfortable size.

Ensure Fast Loading of Web Page

While designing a mobile site, ensure that it should be streamlined, leaned and light. Users may not avail Wi-Fi connection every time. Therefore, it takes lot of time for loading video rich sites. For ensuring navigator’s satisfaction, mobile pages should load in short time and images should be optimized for maximum compression. Avoid including complex widgets as they make the mobile page design bulky. You should always think how navigators would use your site. So, design it accordingly.

Avoid Using Rich Content and Widgets

The most demanded mobile sites are simple, fast and light. Save your high-resolution video galleries and parallax scrolling effects for desktop usage. As a part of algorithm change, Goggle has confirmed inaccessible content like Flash that will have negative impact on ranking.
If your embedded media or widget fails to raise user experience, then remove the same and implement easier or faster way for displaying contents. For example, instead of showing video regarding customer endorsement, you put quotes of your clients that can be easily scrolled through.

Use Suitable Cross Links

Websites that have separate URLs for mobile and desktop versions, it is the common practice to include links, which can connect two versions. While going for responsive web design, see that should connect the relevant counterpart.

Follow the above-mentioned tips for creating user- friendly mobile site that will help visitors search and find contents easily and add revenue to your business.

Technology for the Elderly – the issue has never been dealt with the seriousness it requires. It has never caught the attention of many. Let’s face it, we all consider Technology as a subject of the ‘young’. Even the big companies roll out new gadgets and applications for the new crop of people. Who cares for the wrinkled-skin, gray-haired fellows?

Elderly citizens are not techno-geeks, however, it doesn’t make them tech-averse. They love technology and wish to play with it. It is estimated that by 2030, 19% of the senior citizens will be the active tech users. Ageing is a tough phase, but what is more tougher is keeping pace with the fast-growing world and operating high-tech gadgets. As technology makers, companies should understand the sensitivities of old-age. Through this article, we bring to you the four most crucial factors which must be considered while developing technology for the elderly.

Vision and Hearing Difficulties

We say, age is a state of mind. If you think young, you feel young. But, we have no control over the physical changes which are inevitable. Vision and Hearing issues are the most obvious and predictable health problems associated with the aging.

As we reach 40, we start losing our ability to view the objects clearly, which can be remedied using reading glasses and contact lens. The condition is Presbyopia. The capacity to recognize or distinguish colors also dwindles with the age. Floaters and dry eyes are the common issues. Similarly, adults often complain of hearing loss and other complications which make interactions difficult. This makes Technology a maze-like
path difficult to navigate.

The Solution: While creating Technology, the companies should pay special attention to the font sizes and contrast of the content. Whatever the latest product is, check its compatibility with older eyes using screen readers. Give plenty of adjustment options to the such people. As vision is a challenge, provide subtitles to the video and audio content for a quality user experience.

Create For Bigger Devices

Almost 80% of the entire population uses smartphones for carrying out their regular internet-based tasks. The rest of the 20% is the older guys who consider Smartphones as an ‘absurd’ love of the young, the presence of which has eliminated the personal touch. Those who own them doesn’t use them so often.

The elderly are the ‘Technophobes’ when it comes to Smartphones with screens which make readability a Herculean task.To recapitulate, smartphones are for the youngsters and old people dislikes the invention.

The Solution: For better vision, old pals use tablets or desktops. Technology developers should provide content in a way that it can easily get adjusted to any screen size. In the modern-day jargon, it is known as Responsive Website Design. Stop conveying messages using SMSs. They carry no relevance for the oldies and often ignored.

Focus on the Motor Skills

Motor skills are the actions performed by the body due to the movement of the muscles. Such skills are categorized as gross and fine and highly critical for the day-to-day activities in life. With age, the adults experience a serious deterioration of the motor skills and therefore, voluntary movements becomes a hassle. Old folks find it difficult to move the mouse or tap the interfaces due to poor motor control.

The Solution: While designing interfaces, reduce the space between the tappable buttons and arrange them in a perfect and understandable sequence. Deciding on the size of the buttons in vital to address the vision troubles. The button size must be 9.6 millimeters for septuagenarians and larger for those who are in the 80s. Make sure that the interface elements can be operated using a mouse.Furthermore, concentrate on the size of the overall interface design.

Take Note the Memory Gaps

Older adults often face a tough time while recalling a past moment due to poor memory. A greater share of the elderly population suffers from procedural and short-term memory loss. The most important objective of technology is to make lives simpler. Thus, it must offer sufficient indications on how to manage a new-fashioned gadget and application.

The Solution: They shouldn’t feel like they are stuck in a labyrinth of technology which has no escape. The operational framework must be made simpler and easier to remember. Do not challenge them further. Avoid creating long and lengthy tasks and if possible, provide reminders for easy manageability.

Neglecting the old-age chaps will lead the tech-crazy world nowhere. It’s time to make this world easier for them as they need it the most.

The W3C guidelines for Mobile Web Best Practices discuss the ‘One Web’ approach. This refers to providing “the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across all devices. The context of mobile use, device capability variations, bandwidth issues and mobile network capabilities all affect the representation.” In order to adapt this approach the organization should choose between responsive or adaptive web designs. But before listing the differences, let’s define these web design techniques for you.

What is Responsive Web Design?

In case, you are unfamiliar with this term, responsive web design is a type of design that will adjust perfectly to the device you are using, for instance, tablet, desktop or smartphones. While the content will remain the same, the design is made in such a way that it will easily fit the interface. This is not a technology. Rather it is a design based approach that can solve all the problems related to the varying screen sizes. Thus, the websites can perform irrespective of device or resolution issues. The responsive design is significant for the mobile users for providing a complete experience. In the recent years mobile has become one of the key devices for accessing internet.

The term was coined by Ethan Marcotte. It is one of the most common ways to make your website mobile friendly where CSS3 is incorporated along with media queries and fluid grids that utilizes percentages to develop a flexible base. In addition to these, flexible images and videos are also used so that the website layout can adapt itself to any of the viewing devices or environments.

What is Adaptive Web Design?

For both Adaptive and Responsive the basic notion is the same. The main aim is to create a website that will work on multiple screens. However, Adaptive Web Design uses a detection script on the web server. It can automatically identify the device that the user utilizes to visit the website. Accordingly, it delivers a suitable version for that site owing to the capabilities and the size of the device.

Adaptive Web Design uses the various components of PE (progressive enhancement) in the design process so that they can identify the user instread of the brwoser. Predefined layout sizes are used depending on the size of the screen. JavaScript and CSS are used in the layouts. AWD is the predeccessor of RWD. It has coined at a time when Media Queries (CSS3) were not known to the web world. The key difference between these two design processes is that one uses Media Queries and the other does not.

If you are looking for an alternative to Responsive, then it has to be the Adaptive way. The most important difference is that the server that hosts the website will detect the device. This information is then delivered to various branches of CSS and HTML codes depending on the features of the detected device. What it significantly delivers is an experience that is built specifically for the mobile customers.

Differences Between Adaptive Web Design and Responsive Web Design
The primary difference between the two is that Adaptive adapts the device and screen dimensions while Responsive changes fluidly and responds to fit screen sizes. But there are other differences between them as well –

Separate websites have to be developed and maintained for AWD either with the help of separate CSS/HTML codes or by separate URL. For Responsive Web Design HTML or CSS3 and JavaScript is used. Thus, there is no need to maintain separate URLS or CSS/HTMLs.

Secondly, if your website is adaptive then every time you make a change, you will have reqork on SEO, linking and content. In comparison, the HTML/CSS3 and Javascript in responsive allows you to easily make the changes that will be carried over.

Adapative Websites depend on the predefined screen sizes. RWD relies on fluid and flexible grids. The latter needs more numbers of coding and plans to implement them so that the webpages fit the varying screen sizes.

Fourthly, the adaptive web designs are applied on a website that already exists. However, in case of responsive web designs the website should be built from scratch.

Inspite of the advantages, RWD is applied more than AWD. There are primarily 3 reasons for this –

1. Since the customers can browse through the information of their choice easily, the retention of the brand increases. Responsive web design successfully captures the attention of the users owing to its convenience.

2. Responsive websites are easy to surf from a mobile device. As a result, one can work faster on it than a conventional desktop. Hence, the turnaround is faster.

3. Every business desires a global approach. With its customers spread across the world, it is vital for the company to be available for its customers round clock. A mobile web app increases accessibility.

Finally, it is upto the business to decide which one will be right one. Both the website designs have their own merits. The only way to find out which is more applicable is by putting the need of the customers first as well as the business goals.

What are the popularly employed techniques?

According to Pew Research Internet Project 90% adults have cellphones while 58% of them are using smartphones and 42% have a tablet. Optimizing the websites with mobile technology only help in creating better value for the customers. It enables the consumers to see your products or services anytime, anywhere. Therefore, several techniques are being adapted by the developers so as to optimize the sites for mobile technology including mobile stylesheets, using fluid layouts, creating stylesheets specific to platforms, doing away with unnecessary content, etc.

Exploring the technologies

Mobile stylesheet comprises the creation of an alternative CSS style that has been optimized specifically for the handheld devices by making use of a similar kind of HTML markup. Another technology employed by the developers is the fluid layouts. This implies that no fixed width, height etc are applied so that the elements can be resized depending on the size of the screen. The platform specific stylesheets ensure that there is a specific one for each mobile platform including iPhone, Windows or Android phones.

Technology is ever growing and as it progresses, it will create an impact on the mobile devices as well. To keep in sync with the new mobile devices, web development will be compelled to adapt to the new demands from the users. Here’s a quick list that points out how mobile technology has influenced the website design in the recent years –

Responsive Web Design

There has been an apparent shift to RWD in the recent years and understandably so. For those savvy web developers and web users, responsive web design is irreplaceable. As a business owner if you are aiming at providing uncompromising user experience then you cannot overlook this web design pattern. The impact of RWD was apparent when in 2013 Facebook announced changes in its News Feed that was completely based on the principles of responsive design. Today, it is no more a trend but a necessity that the web developers simply cannot ignore.

Longer pages

This is a trend that took many by surprise. Even a couple of years back, short website pages were in vogue where the users did not have to scroll down incessantly for information. Since last year there has been a major shift in this trend as longer pages were included in the websites. The reason for this is that users prefer scrolling down and viewing information on the same page instead of reloading a new one.

Getting rid of the side bar

A few years back it was quite common to include around 2 or 3 columns in the website design. There were columns for the side menu, content and another one for showing the quick links. However, now it is all about displaying the website centrally while it is designed organically based on the content. There are no more sidebars to take care of.

Centralizing elements

If you notice carefully, you will find that the new trend in website design is to include all the elements (even the logo) centrally. The information as well as the other components will appear on the middle of your mobile screens. It renders a more cleaner and smarter look.

Ditch the mobile sites

With the responsive website becoming more dominant, it is time to bid farewell to the mobile site concept. It is estimated that by the end of 2015, the mobile sites will be completely phased out. Besides RWD, mobile apps, too have contributed significantly in shifting away from the mobile websites. The need of the hour is to build sites that are not only optimized for mobiles but they will look great on desktops as well.

Simplicity and innovation score

Do you have ample to time to deal with complexities? Neither does the users. Creating complex sites will repel the browsers. Right from industry bigwigs to development experts, all are of the view that too much content or a huge website will not have the desired impact. Although more content ensures that you index and that is good for search engine rankings. But the trend is to harp on quality rather than quantity. While enterprise websites might have thousands of pages but a small business site does not require the same.

It is equally important to innovate. There are several websites that appear similar. It is time to move away from such similarities and create something new.

The concern here is that it isn’t easy to keep up with all the changes taking place in mobile website design services owing to the growth of mobile technology. It would be interesting to see how designers and developers can play along innovatively with the dynamic design elements and use the minimal to achieve a maximum impact.