3 Core Differences Between Desktop Website Design and Mobile Website Design

by James Jo · Published December 19, 2012 · Updated August 29, 2014

With an increasing number of people accessing the internet through their mobile devices, it makes sense for businesses to develop mobile websites, apart from their regular websites.

But, there are a number of people who don’t really understand the difference between regular web design and the mobile website design. They believe that a mobile website is just a smaller version of its desktop counterpart. But, this is not the case, as there are certain important differences that they need to be aware about.

Let’s take a look at them:

# Screen Size

Well for starters, the real estate available for a mobile website is much less as compared to that available for desktop websites. So, more often than not mobile websites are designed to cater to a display area of around 4 inches, and compared to the almost 19 inches of display size available on desktop monitors, this is a huge difference. So, you can’t just expect that you miniaturize your web page and hope that it looks good as a mobile web page as well. You will need to make changes to the layout of the mobile website, and remove everything and anything that you find unnecessary on it. On a mobile website, you need to use a mixture of collapsible content, bigger font size and of course widgets need to be integrated that can expand when clicked.

So, you will need to design for the screen size, which is incidentally a huge difference between both types of websites.

Also Read: Responsive Website Design: Three Reasons Why It Is a Must Nowadays

# Fingers vs. Mouse

Another big difference in design is the fact that the features and functionalities of mobile websites should be conducive to gestures, while on regular websites, a mouse is usually used to point to objects on the website. Users, who perform tasks on mobile websites tap to open, swipe to go through content and use all sorts of gestures to navigate the pages. So a designer needs to keep that into consideration. So, they need to avoid using a lot of text based hyperlinks and focus more on collapsible widgets as well as larger navigation buttons.

Also Read: 10 Extraordinary Books for Designers to Ace Responsive Web Designing

# Image Use

As can be imagined, the lack of screen size also affects the use of images on the mobile website. While on desktop websites, designers can use high resolution images, which are of large size, mobile website designers don’t have that kind of luxury. They cannot afford to waste screen size on the use of images, as they have very little space in the first place. So, even in a situation wherein, the use of images is absolutely mandatory, they avoid the use of high resolutions images, and keep the size really very minimal.

Also Read: How Responsive Design for Your Website Can Work Wonders

To Conclude

These are just some of the many differences that you will encounter when it comes to desktop and mobile websites. You must understand all the necessary differences to ensure that you are able to bring forth the best mobile websites and of course great website designs as well. More importantly, if you are a client, who wants to get both kinds of website designed, its important to understand all the differences to know whether your mobile and/or desktop website is really worth it or not.