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The prevailing belief regarding mobile web sites has always been they are a brand’s second site, usually built after the PC version.  Luke Wroblewski, the Chief Design Architect at Yahoo! Inc, disagrees.  At the recent An Event Apart conference in Minneapolis, MN, he presented three reasons why he feels that we change our design procedure to be Mobile First.

The three main reasons are as follows:

• Mobile is Exploding - It is no secret the smartphone explosion is changing the face of mobile. The mobile web is literally everywhere now, and it won’t be long before there are more mobile users than PC users.
• Mobile Forces You To Focus - By designing for mobile first, you have to design for a smaller, more concise and clear UI.  By doing so, you cut out a lot of the unnecessary fluff that people don’t need (or want) on a web site. The popular web comic xkcd did a good job of showing the difference between what the content people are getting on a web site and the content they want.
• Mobile Extends Your Capabilities - The mobile interface uses touch and gestures that both change and extend the capabilities of a normal web site.

Changing your design procedures to Mobile First is a radical step, but I think the right one. It will result in cleaner, more efficient web sites and applications that are designed to operate on both the web now, and the web as it is evolving.