Mobile Magic: The Saatchi and Saatchi Guide to Mobile Marketing and Design

Chapter 2: Why Go Mobile-First?

Take a quick tour of your favorite websites from your desktop, and then look at them at the same time on a mobile device. You’ll notice that most websites now offer mobile-optimized versions that make it easy for visitors to interact with their information via smaller screens and fewer taps. If you can’t see a difference between the mobile and desktop sites, look at the web address: If there’s a “.m.” or “.t.”anywhere in the URL (standing for “mobile” or “tablet”), you’ll know you’re on a mobile-optimized site. Even when formatting isn’t an issue, web developers have also begun to drift away from tools that work perfectly fine on the web but don’t look as good on mobile. Flash Player, for example: In 2008, Steve Jobs announced that iOS mobile browsers would no longer support this once-popular multimedia software. Android followed suit a few years later. Now the majority of web and mobile designers prefer to use other coding methods like HTML5 for rich-interaction, video, and other multimedia capabilities, largely because they recognize the need for their work to be portable and consumable on mobile just as much as on desktop.

Why? When? How?

Mobile-first doesn’t mean throwing everything else out the window. A focus throughout this book is on helping ...