How To Make Your Blog More Mobile Friendly
|Where is your phone right now? Is it within reach, as it is most of the time? You’re not alone. More people are accessing the net via mobile devices than ever before. This makes sense when you look at how often we are fiddling with our phones, killing time on tablets, and surfing the web with on the go.
This poses a new issue for website owners and developers, as they try to design websites that provide functionality for both mobile and desktop web surfers. If a site isn’t designed with a mobile-forward thinking, visitors could spend so much time scrolling, pinching, and zooming that they’re lost forever. To avoid this, it’s very important that you focus on providing a more mobile friendly blog approach to your site design.
Start On the Right Platform
More than anything, the right website platform can make or break your entire website. If you have already been dealing with website design to some extent, you have already seen how different website platforms can be. Maybe you’ve even seen how each one is a little different. The time has come for you to dive deep into your blogging platform and see what’s under the hood.
Just as almost every other aspect of your website, the platform you choose to publish your site on can truly affect how mobile-optimized your site is in the end. When looking at blogging platforms, look closely at the number of desktop only and mobile-friendly themes, even before you purchase anything. If they seem to heavily focused on traditional websites, then you are probably dealing with a platform that will provide extra hurdles on the path to mobile freedom.
Switch to Mobile-Optimized or Responsive Theme
By now, you should already be pretty comfortable with your blogging platform. You’ve likely already posted a bunch of times and shared a ton of pictures of your cat by now, so now it’s time to get in there and play with the actual theme of your blog.
Your blog’s theme is the design of your blog. It may have some fancy name like Art Deco Mobile Blog Theme, but they all work the same. If you have a recently created or updated themes, chances are there is an option somewhere to optimize your site for mobile. This is the preferred and easiest method to make your blog or website mobile-friendly. If it does not, I suggest switching themes unless you are well-versed in web design and coding.
A responsive design theme will read your visitors’ screens and adapt your website to fit them. Instead of simply shrinking everything down to fit the screen, the responsive design turns your traditional blog into a mobile blog by streamlining everything on the page. Often times, this will give priority to your images, so it may take some practice to get placement exactly how you like to fit both traditional and mobile visitors.
Writing is Always Important
Of course, you can always make a few changes to the way you blog to make a little more mobile friendly blog:
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Use short paragraphs
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Be concise and to the point
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Avoid a wall of text
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Break text up with images
People will continue to switch away from traditional computers for their web surfing. You must adapt with them or be left behind. Going mobile on your blog isn’t as hard as you think, and the rewards are great.