Stop Losing Half of Your Internet Traffic and Design for Mobile First

On YouTube: Stop Losing Half of Your Internet Traffic and Design for Mobile First

As of two days ago, I was still designing websites using an approach from last century (I was a site architect in the late '90s).

Source: Lucas Amunategui

According to ComScore's 2018 Global Digital Future in Focus, mobile users are spending more than twice the time on their devices than desktop users. By deduction, if your site, your video, your podcast, or whatever you're uploading, is not primarily designed for mobile users, you could be catering to only a third of Internet users - crazy, right?

It gets worse. According to the same report, the mobile platform has ushered a whole new wave of Internet users for whom the desktop platform was never an option.

Hopefully, you're better than me in this department and this is old news. As of two days ago, I was still designing websites using an approach from last century (I was a site architect in the late '90s).

Mobile First Design & HTML Responsive Web Design

Source: fredericgonzalo.com

Thankfully, we now have tools and design patterns to educate our new web designers (and reform the old ones) in the proper way of doing things. Mobile First Design encourages designing for the smallest screen first and making one's way out in ascending order. Responsive Web Design, on the other hand, ensures that objects move and resize nicely according to the screen size.

In the '90s, we'd build sites on our desktop, tested them with whatever browser was installed on our workstations and hoped for the best. We'd then wait for complaints around compatibility issues to trickle in and address them (usually with ugly band-aids)

From the Ground up and Exclusively for Mobile

This past weekend, I spent a few hours rebuilding my site, ViralML.com from the ground up using HTML Responsive Web Design and 100% of my focus on mobile.

I used a great and simple W3Schools' template as the basis for a multi-row and column site. The end result may look at sparse and minimal on a desktop…

Very zen…

But, damn, it looks great on every imaginable mobile platform according to Responsinator.com:

Thanks, Responsinator!

Not Just Websites

And this approach applies to anything you build for the Internet. If its YouTube videos (and I make plenty of those), don't use minuscule text, small images, fast scrolling objects, etc. unless you want to make some enemies.

Check out my eBook on Amazon for more branding tips:

Find my new eBook on Amazon.com

Thanks for reading! And please share this article with a friend or colleague or two :-)

Best!
Manuel Amunategui,
Curator @ amunategui.github.io and ViralML