While it’s been around long enough to be well past the point of being the latest trend, mobile design is getting another hashing over in the news. In several different media outlets, it’s become apparent that there are some logistics involved in mobile design that go far beyond making things accessible or reaching out to a broader audience.
Ads and Mobile Design
At the heart of any mobile design endeavor is creating a webpage that can accommodate the smaller – and frequently changing – sizes of the various mobile designs on the market. What commonly becomes an issue, according to many experts, is how to maintain the visibility of advertising on webpages while still allowing users access to content.
The trade-off here is not hard to understand. In order to accommodate the screen sizes of both a smart phone and an iPad, webpages are necessarily compacted and reduced in terms of the amount of content that they present. In addition to this, many advertisements demand system resources in a way that is not necessarily amicable to the smaller processors found on mobile devices.
To make things even more complex, including advertisements also tends to reduce them to sizes that may make them completely unreadable on mobile devices. Combine this with the banner blindness that users on the Internet typically exhibit, and you have a formula for making mobile design more complex than ever. Without advertisements, most sites lose their profitability very quickly and offering a mobile alternative to the full website may make it impossible for advertisers to maintain their conversions on the advertising that they are paying for.
Adjusting to Variability
With a constant stream of new Apple and Android devices coming out on the market, it’s become apparent that screen sizes are not likely to be consistent anytime soon and that designers will have to continue to accommodate this ever shifting playing field where getting advertisements in front of eyes is concerned.
According to some experts, this may make the mobile design trend simply a fad that is about to outlive its usefulness. With mobile devices getting larger screens all the time, in fact, it is more convenient for some users to use the full-sized, desktop version of a website than it is to use the oftentimes compromised functionalities of mobile websites. Where design is concerned, including multimedia, banners and other popular forms of advertisements is likely to continue to be a significant challenge as the mobile landscape evolves.
