Images in Mobile Web Sites

The prevailing thought among mobile web designers is to limit the number and size of images on a mobile site. This is to reduce and speed up the number of server requests required to render the site. But Mickey Alam Khan, editor in chief of Mobile Marketer, appears to disagree…

In a recent article in Mobile Marketer, Mr. Alam Khan offers the following best practices for mobile marketing:

1. Have a mobile-friendly web site.
2. Make sure a site or application has a search function on every single page.
3. Invest in a common short code to build a CRM list.
4. Run mobile banner advertising.
5. Use large images. Nothing like an image to sell your brand.

The last one there surprised me. While he is correct - images do a better job of selling your brand - including “Use large images” as a best practice is a little premature in my opinion. Yes, networks are getting better, and today’s smart phones are more like a mini pc than a phone, but we have not yet made it to the point where there is enough mobile bandwidth to start encouraging large images on every mobile site. Especially considering the fact that a poor mobile web performance has such a strong negative effect on brand.

My guess is a little clarity would be useful here - large images are useful and recommended in mobile applications, which are downloaded one time with the rest of the application download. For mobile web sites, however, I would stick with the W3C recommendation of keeping the total page size under 20kb, and removing images that are not central to the brand or page content. At least for now…