It’s officially 2012, and with it comes more trends in all aspects of advertising and marketing on the web. Mobile browsers are growing rapidly and a lot of designers should be (if not already) wondering how to optimize their website for this rapidly growing market. Before jumping right into the design of a mobile optimized site you must address some general rules of design and architecture.

1. Keep your content to a minimum

Not everything on a desktop browser is necessary for a mobile device. Low priority content that is located outside the main content area can be removed. The mobile site should be concentrated on the important content. You have very little real estate and download speed to clutter up your site with useless information. Just remember to “keep it simple”.

2. Single columns are much more effective

Wide sites with multiple columns are hard to view on small mobile screens. Most smart phones like the iPhone load pages zoomed out to fit all the content. This makes it very hard for the user to view the information without zooming all the way in and loosing the rest of the pages’ information.

3. Keep text input to a minimum

Physical QWERTY keyboards have been found be the most uncomplicated to use, followed by the touchscreen QWERTY keyboards, and finally traditional 12 button physical 12 alphanumeric keypads. Even with that, most users make far more error on when using the significantly smaller mobile keyboards. Because of this, it is best to keep the amount of user input to a minimal.

4. Design for both touchscreen and non-touchscreen users

Smartphones account for the larger number of mobile Internet users in many countries, including the UK and USA. This makes it very important to design your mobile site for smartphones. We haven’t completely converted to a touchscreen-only world yet, so it’s important to design for both touchscreen and non-touchscreen users.

The largest problem when viewing web pages on a smartphone is when selecting an element, particularly tapping, small text links accurately. It would be nice if we all had fingers the size of a stylus, but that’s just not the case. Fingers tend to hit a small links accurately. Try to use blocky rows that span the width of the screen or square boxes that can be tapped easily.

5. Take advantage of the technology available

Today’s mobile and smartphones have an advantage over regular PCs – they come with lots of inbuilt functionality that most PCs don’t have. You can make the user’s experience easier by taking advantage of the phones built-in functionality. You can allow users to make calls by tapping a phone number, pull up the phone’s map application by tapping an address, or allow users to input other technology such as QR codes.

Technology is constantly changing, so it’s important to keep up on the latest trends and innovations these phones produce on a regular basis.