Mobile Web Design
Will 2008 be the year that making your site viewable on mobile devices becomes truly important? Up until now there haven’t been enough users to warrant giving much thought to the mobile phone market, but with the innovative iPhone and the continuing rise of Blackberry users, it may be time to get on the bandwagon. Sites that appeal to users on the go are going to see the most mobile traffic but most web analysts agree that everyone across the board will start to see more hits from these devices.
The main challenge of designing your web content so that it will be compatible with mobile devices is that the screens are just so darn small. Devices like the iPhone have interfaces that simply shrink down web pages so they fit on the screen, but since many phones display web pages differently it can be hard to make your site work for devices without making an entirely separate site.
Some web designers have had success adding mobile device specific style sheets that remove most formatting, since that’s where mobile browsers have the most trouble displaying things. This however does not solve the problem of images since many phones do not display images by default.
Bigger companies like Flickr and Google have created separate sites that dispense with virtually all formatting, just giving their users the content that they desire. In the game of who can display the information the fastest, this approach is the best for the end user. If mobile users are a big part of your target market, this seems to be the way to go.
Want to know more? You may want to read Mobile Web Design, a new book by Cameron Moll.
If that book seems like too much for now, here are some of Moll’s blog posts about this very subject from 2005. Authentic Boredom presents: Mobile Web Design
Last but not least, Google Mobile Proxy is a neat tool to see how your website will probably appear on a mobile device.