I recently developed a dotMobi site for a limo company.
The process of designing and developing for mobile phones has its differences from the desktop browser that we are all used to. Some aspects to take into consideration are:
- An effective design in order to be compatible for multiple screen sizes.
- Correct MIME types
- Tables, frames, pop-ups, page refresh, redirection are strictly not allowed
- Use of small images (Max 200 pixels wide) and alt text
There are many tools out there to help you design a better mobile site. I regularly use mobiReady in order to get a full report, analysis and a score of pages in order to determine how well the site performs on various mobile devices.
Another useful tool is the User Agent Switcher, which is an add-on application for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and Songbird. The tool lets you turn your browser into a mobile’s browser, therefore you get to see how you web pages will display before testing it on the actual device.
The last tool is the W3C mobile validator, which performs a test on the web site and determines its level of mobile friendliness and whether you used valid XHTML and CSS markup.
Do you have any tools that you would like share?
