More and more use is being made of the Internet by mobile phone users. Most web sites work badly with mobile devices, and designing web site to work better is tricky: there is a wide range of devices and browsers; testing the site on even a small proportion of the possible combinations is not a viable proposition.
Furthermore, mobile users are generally paying for their data - so big or graphics rich pages are costly (as well as usually pointless) to view. Finally, mobile Internet users behave differently from users of Macs or PCs. For example, they may not know how to enter text into their browser, or the may be slow at doing it. Users tend to find things by searching and then navigating.
dotMobi controls access to the ".mobi" top-level domain. It also publishes Style Guides for developers of mobile web sites. These seem largely to be based on the output from the World Wide Web Consortium's Mobile Web Initiative; and generalising a bit glibly, the way to make a web site work for mobile phone users is to:
- use well-formed mark-up that conforms to the relevant W3C standards;
- follow a few very specific design rules concerning the maximum size of images, the positioning of navigation links, and the use of Cascading Style Sheets to control format rather than tables;
- test it on the entry-level, older phones, that are still in widespread use.
(For much more on all this, see this 31/5/2007 talk by Icelander Gummi Hafsteinsson, Google's Mobile Applications Product Manager.)
dotMobi has several useful tools on its web site. For example, you can subject a URL to a fairly comprehensive test of how well it is likely to work with mobile devices. Or you can access a clever emulator of a couple of different mobile phones [JAVA enabled browser needed] enter a URL, and see how that URL is likely to render in either of the phones. Fairly badly in the example given....
Several readers of Fortnightly Mailing know a lot about "mobile learning". Comments on the way they or the projects with which they are familiar have got content to work reliably on mobile devices will be very welcome.
Comments