Mobile Website Discussion Continued...

Continuing with my last post about options for optimizing your website for mobile web viewers, I will be expanding on the topic of building a separate mobile site. Most website owners will fall into the "Do Nothing" or the "Separate Style Sheet for Mobile Devices" but some will find by developing a separate mobile website will help them achieve their goals. If you are serious about creating a mobile site you will need to be aware of 3 main areas:

1. Content Awareness
2. Download Time
3. Mobile Browser Capabilities

Content Awareness

Structuring and writing content for a mobile device is different than for viewing on your regular PC or laptop. Mobile devices have smaller screens and viewer's attention spans can be limited or fragmented. The first step is to go through and prioritize what is most important and what will mobile viewers use the most. You will need to prioritize and condense your content to the bare minimum and place the most important items toward the top of your pages.

Download Time

There is a range of internet connection time with mobile networks and how long it will take to download pages. When down load time is slow, the attention spans of viewers is short. Limiting the amount of images used on a site will greatly increase download time. Make sure that the code, for the mobile site, passes todays standards and headings, paragraphs and list are used correctly to keep the file sizes down.

Mobile Browser Capabilities

Browsers on normal computers have almost reached a point where all browsers will display web pages the same. Mobile devices do not have this luxury and will display pages differently depending on the device. As I mentioned in my last post, some mobile devices will only display text and will remove any colors and images from the page. Testing your mobile site on multiple mobile devices is encouraged to help with debugging and viewing consistency.