subject: Making your website mobile [print this page] Making your website mobile Making your website mobile
Making Your Website Mobile
The mobile web allows access to the internet anywhere. There's no doubt about it, mobile web is the next big thing you won't be able to 'live without'. However, the mobile web does have some limitations that you need to understand before making your website mobile.
Mobile Web Limitations (at the moment at least!)
Speed - mobile web isn't as fast as desktop access. Even with fast WiFi, many mobile devices don't have the processor and graphics card performance to match your desktop computer.
Screen size and resolution - mobile devices have smaller screens and much lower screen resolutions and aspect ratios
Lack of applications - most mobile devices don't have flash or javascript capabilities making some content inaccessible
Page sizes - websites designed with fixed width or height pages will be hard to use on mobile devices
Taking Your Site Mobile
Mobile Browser Detection
When visitors hit your website using a mobile device you may want to direct them to a specific part of your website. Even better, to feed them a specific version of your website that's tailored to their mobile device. There are lot's of scripts and services out there to do just that.
Domains and Subdomains
You might want to restrict mobile devices from accessing certain areas of your site. If you're creating a mobile version of your website you might want to create a specific domain or subdomain for it. Mobile specific domain examples are:
m. prefix - as used by m.google.com and m.cnn.com, the mobile versions of google and CNN respectively. As most hosting companies don't charge for subdomains this can be the free option.
.mobi - this is the new high level domain specifically for the mobile web. This domain was sponsered by major telecoms and software companies to seperate their mobile sites.
Using the right code
Although you can use HTML to build mobile sites there are other coding languages designed to make mobile web pages as easy to use as possible:
XHTML - markup language based on HTML that allows web pages to work better on some mobiles
Wireless Markup Language - an early version of a language in development specifically for mobile devices
Page sizes
With screen real estate at an absolute premium, large images and headers should be kept to a minimum to free room for the real information you want to get accross.
Interface
The interface on a mobile device may be completely different to a desktop. You have to keep this in the forefront of your thinking when designing mobile websites.
Shortcuts - include them whenever you can. It's much easier to hit a shortcut than scroll on a mobile device.
Vertical scrolling - this is not easy to do on some mobile devices!
Horizontol scrolling - should be avoided at all costs on mobile. Some don't allow this at all
Page size - some mobile users are paying to download and download speeds are often much reduced
Stuff to avoid
Some things that work on the desktop web don't function at all on some mobile devices. These include:
