Check your Website for Mobile Compatibility Part 2 ~ codemakit

A Website can be easily converted into a mobile Website. A blogger based blog, still easier. What after the conversion? How do you reckon that the website is now mobile friendly and none of any readers will have problems opening the website in their PDA.

A previous article by codemakit talked on compatibility of websites for its use in mobile devices. The article talked of GoMo which developed a tool known as GoMometer which analyses the websites and reports its findings.

A major disadvantage in GoMo is that you need a person to give the feed-back. In Short, you need to ask a person to visit your website and fill the GoMo form. When many of them view and report their satisfaction/dissatisfaction, you'll get a fair idea about the website in question. But what should you do when you do not have enough beta testers, or if you're alone, you’ll need something better and faster.

Behold! Out from the ashes, emerge, "Google Webmasters Mobile Friendly Test"! There exists a bar where you need to enter your website's URL and click analyze. To think of it, it is very similar to the page speed analysis page.

Best Practices for Mobile Compatibility

Though Google has enlisted some stuff which has to be thought of before you consider it as a mobile website, you can still view the condensed version of Google's Webmaster mobile best practices.

Large Sizes

The worst thing about viewing a website from a mobile device is the strain your eyes have to endure while reading. A lower font size not only increases eye strain but also lowers the reader's interest leading to higher bounce rates and lesser session duration & Pages per session. If you're not sure which font size is the best, check out codemakit's study on the best font sizes for websites and the best font types for better user interaction.

Low Flash

your website must have minimum of Flash content as it creates complications in mobile environment. Actually too much of flash content is not good for any website.

Though Flash content looks more beautiful than most non-flash websites, the flash content is rarely read by bots and hence it is not indexed.

Viewports

The Ability of the website to scale itself, since the website will be opened in Tablets, Desktop computers, mobile devices etc. you cannot expect the text box in the website to be the same throughout. You'll need to configure your website's viewport so that the website content is modified to find with different screen widths. (For more information check out Google’s support page on setting the Viewport)

Checking Mobile Compatibility

If you have followed the three steps enumerated above and you're still not sure about how google sees your mobile website, you can have a look at Webmaster's mobile friendly tools.

Though Google is reliable, what is more reliable than the creators of the internet, W3C or World Wide Web consortium too has an awesome mobile check tool, where after analyzing a URL, it will display the areas in which the website is weak and need improvement. Being a purely technical checking tool, the W3c mobile Checker can be a harsh checker. (It gives a score of 37% out of 100 to facebook.com) But it has the ability to point out separate problems in the website.