Strategy
Your Customers Are on Phones. Your Website Was Designed on a Laptop.
By the LA Web Design team6 min read
For most local businesses, somewhere between half and three quarters of visitors arrive on a phone. Almost every website is still designed on a large monitor and checked on a phone at the end. That order is backwards, and it shows up in small ways that cost real inquiries.
Mobile-friendly and mobile-first are different things
A mobile-friendly website shrinks to fit. A mobile-first website is designed for the small screen and then given more room on desktop. The difference is what gets priority. When everything can't fit, mobile-first forces a decision about what matters most. Shrinking just stacks everything in the original order and hopes for the best.
Thumbs, not cursors
A mouse pointer is a single pixel. A thumb is about the size of a nickel. Buttons and links need enough room to be hit without zooming, enough space between them that the wrong one doesn't get tapped, and they need to sit where a thumb naturally reaches — the lower two thirds of the screen, not tucked into a top corner.
The phone number should be a tap, not a copy-paste
On a phone, a phone number should dial when touched, an address should open maps, and an email should open mail. These take a few characters of code and they're missing from a surprising number of websites, which quietly asks every mobile visitor to do extra work at the exact moment they were ready to contact you.
Watch what's hiding
Long menus collapse into a burger icon, forms get taller, and tables go sideways. Check what happens to the things that matter. Is the main call to action still visible without scrolling? Did the contact form become fourteen stacked fields? Did a table of services turn into a horizontal scroll nobody will find?
Test on a real phone, on real data
Browser preview tools are useful, but they run on your fast office connection. Open the website on your own phone, off wifi, and try to do what a customer would do. Find a detail, book a call, fill in the form. The friction becomes obvious in ninety seconds and is nearly invisible in a desktop mockup.
Design for the worst case, not the best
Assume an older phone, one hand, bright sunlight, and half attention. A website that works under those conditions works everywhere else too. That's the whole argument for mobile-first: it's the hardest case, so solving it first makes every other screen easier.