In case you were unaware, mobile technology has radically altered websites. Here’s how.

In my estimation, the web has gone through four eras.

Up until the late 1990s, it was dominated mostly by developers. With dial up connections as the only means of reaching websites and a heavy contingent of nerds doing the surfing and building of websites, sites were graphics light and built around existing platforms for limited use.

By the end of the century, designers began to take over realizing that there was real marketing potential in building websites. As a result, the web became a kind of billboard for business where they wowed customers with Flash animations and dazzling graphics.

Early in the new millennium, a massive influx of everyday people flooded the web searching for more and more information.  The end user suddenly began to demand simpler access to untold amounts of information. Additionally, those same end users began generating content of their own through blogs and social media.

Today, we are in the mobile era. With the majority of people surfing the web via a smart phone or tablet, everything we think about when it comes to building and designing websites has changed, but how?

Orientation

Desktop computer use monitors that are shaped like televisions and those monitors have evolved right alongside TVs. As TVs got wider, so did monitors. But the thing they shared was a wide, short space, designed specifically to handle movie formats — unlike the old box-shaped TVs. Mobile devices like iPhones and iPads are shaped like monitors turned on their sides. Sure, you can turn your phone on its side, but few actually do that.

For over a decade, websites were built to take advantage of the horizontal real estate provided by monitors, but mobile devices have forced designers to change their thinking from horizontal to vertical. Now, information is displayed to take advantage of vertical rather than horizontal space. It is the difference between a portrait photo and a landscape and that is a substantial change.

Scrolling

With the change in orientation came a shift in the philosophy of scrolling. It was commonly thought that the front page of a website should fit into a monitor window with minimal need for scrolling up and down. Phones changed all that.

When it was a mouse and a scroll bar that was needed to move a page vertically, it was taxing on the user. Now, with a single swipe of a phone screen (or a mouse in many instances), information whizzes by. The need to cram everything into a horizontal box was over.

Screen Size

With screens getting every smaller despite the gradual increase in the physical size of smart phones, common practices on the web had to change. Gone were the days of relatively small text and small photos. Now, everything must be bigger so those with tiny screens don’t have to squint to see it.

Load speed

Even with 4G and broadband technology, speed is king. That means websites need to load quickly. Even Google has begun factoring load times into their page rank formula. While graphics need to be large enough to see, the files must be small enough to load fast. And when they aren’t something alerting the user that more is coming like animated loading graphics are necessary.

Animation and Video

Speaking on animation, because Apple made the decision not to allow Flash to display on the iPhone and iPad, any business that wanted animation or video to display on its website had to shift gears quickly. New technologies like JQuery replaced Flash and new video codecs came along to allow us to stream videos on our phones without needing Flash.

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In truth, nothing has so dramatically changed the way we surf the Internet like smartphone technology. It has altered everything from how websites are designed to the underlying code used to build them. Understanding that will help keep you in front of the technology curve as you create or redesign your website.