Mobile Websites
Long ago, there was the internet and it was good. The only problems was you could only access the internet at set places such as work or your home. So if you wanted to check your email or the score of your favorite baseball team online you would have to wait till you were in front of a computer. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. With advancements in mobile devices such as PDAs, cellphones, media players and handheld video game systems you can know access the internet from nearly anywhere. But even with these advances, designing websites and content solely for use on mobile devices is different than a standard website.
The first thing to keep in mind is that the typical mobile device has a lower resolution and a smaller screen size than your average computer or laptop. All the media for the site will have to account for these differences. For example, you will need to make sure that any images, graphics or logos are small enough in size and dimension to fit properly on the screen. You will also want to make sure that any hard set parameters such as page or table sizes are also within an acceptable size if you want to make sure people don’t have to scroll all over your page to simply read a full sentence of content.
Another thing that is typically a unique issue when dealing with website design with mobile devices in mind is compatibility. Some of the popular softwares for embedding media or animation on websites are not supported by some mobile devices. One prime example is that a lot of smart phones currently on the market, including the iPhone and Android, do not support Macromedia Flash. So things that you would do on a normal website such as embed a .flv player or post an animated splash screen would not be prudent. In other words, be sure to check the compatibility of any media, software or scripts against what is currently supported on the most popular mobile devices or you might accidently alienate a large base of your target market from the get go.
So while the mobile market is growing quickly, and we are seeing an increase in the capability of these devices almost daily, there are still some key differences to keep in mind when designing web content for them.
