Make Your Web Pages Mobile-Friendly
- Adapting to Mobile Users Needs
- Knowing Your Audience
- Designing the User Interface
- Implementing the Gateway
- Summary
Adapting to Mobile Users’ Needs
Compared to desktop or laptop computers that most of us commonly use to access the Internet, mobile devices are surprisingly limited in screen resolutions, availability of input devices (keyboard, mouse) and support of web technologies that we usually take for granted. For example, screen resolutions rarely exceed 600 × 400 pixels, keyboards on mobile phones are difficult to use (and they have no mouse), and the browsers deployed on low-end devices using Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) have limited CSS and no JavaScript support.
My article "Use Google as Your Gateway to the Mobile Internet" details the limitations of mobile devices and describes how you can use Google Wireless Transcoder to adapt the content of your web pages to mobile device limitations. In this article, you’ll see how you can redesign your content (assuming that you have it in a more readily accessible format than a "tag soup" of HTML pages) to address the needs of your mobile audience.