How to Make Your Blog Look Great on Smartphones

Your blog needs to be seen by a lot of people in order to achieve popularity, and a part of that popularity is going to come out of being both highly informative and interesting and from the sheer appearance of your blog. While a blog can be ugly and still be a great resource that achieves popularity, you will greatly expand your reach and the number of readers who come back to your blog if it looks good to them. In the modern world, smartphones are the way people look at just about everything.

These days, more and more people are using their smartphones to access the content they want. If you’re still living entirely in the PC age, you are going to be left behind. Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to make your site look great for smartphone users. The following are a few tricks of the trade.

Optimize Your Templates

On websites that allow you to build a blog such as Blogger, you can make your site look good simply by going to the Design tab and looking at the phone version of your site’s preview. From there, you can actually put in a different template specifically for smartphones instead of just using your regular template for every version.

If you are running a blog on your own site, you might consider mirroring your most important sections in a .Mobi domain name. Often you can purchase both your .Com and .Mobi URLs at the same time and keep some uniformity, and by default smartphones will go to your mobile blog. You can then customize this version to look how you want it to and include the most relevant parts of your blog for smartphone users.

Cut Out What Isn’t Necessary

The Internet is different on computers than it is on mobile phones. While people on traditional computers are more likely to be willing to read a longer post, a lot of times smartphone users simply want something shorter and quicker to take in. For this group of people, some of your posts may not be as appropriate as your shorter and more direct ones are.

Naturally, it will take some experimentation to get the mixture right on what will work best for your blog. A lot of the decision behind how long your posts should be for maximum absorption and best effect will ultimately come down to who your target readers are and what they want to see. But as a general rule, cutting out what isn’t necessary will help your blog to look its best on the smaller screens of smartphones.

De-emphasize Fancy Stuff

The classic Internet rule of “no pics, didn’t happen” doesn’t apply as much on smartphones because of the speed differential of mobile Internet versus that of traditional PC Internet. Putting less pics on your smartphone-enabled blog will allow you to load up the page faster. Readers accessing your blog on smartphones will tend to be less forgiving of a site that loads slowly than will users on a traditional computer, so leave most of the pics off the page.

If your blog involves frames, you need to finally let them go. They won’t load well on a smartphone and they’re terribly old hat everywhere else, as well. Other fancy things that you need to let go of are Flash graphics and nested tables. You may also want to streamline and double-check your HTML and CSS to make sure that you have no errors that could end up looking awful on your blog.

Today’s blogs need to be mobile-friendly. A lot of people access the web, and by extension your blog, on their smartphones. So, to stay relevant you are going to have to adapt to this phenomenon.