Should Businesses Have Mobile Friendly Websites?

cellPhoneSafe: "A client of ours has asked us to develop a mobile friendly version of their website. Their CEO has a Pocket PC and his browsing experience of his site is not great. However, aside from keeping him happy, is there a business case for a mobile friendly version of his site? Is there actually any volume of web surfers using a Pocket PC, Palm, or other web-capable pocket devices? It's one thing to convince a client of the benefit of supporting Mozilla (else they'll loose 10% of potential customers), but how do the figures stack up for mobile users? To be honest, I'd be surprised if mobile users accounted for more than 1 in a 1000 visitors to a site, so I'd be interested in your experiences. Have you developed a website for mobile users? Were you overwhelmed with new customers? Did these mobile users expect a different service offering to traditional PC users?"

Chicken and egg?

[blackraven14250]

More mobile users would visit if it were actually somewhat easy to visit. But companies won't make an attempt at a mobile site until there's enough volume. This is why technology gets adapted so damn slowly.

Would mobile users pay for such websites?

[imoou]

It's commonly agreed that a mobile friendly website takes additional resources to create.

Given the fact that most websites have problem asking money from traditional site visitors, I find it hard to believe any additional spending can be justified by most websites.

Having said that, some niche websites, which either [1] are built primarily for mobile users (that is, mobile friendly website is in the initial budget) or [2] offer valuable content which mobile users are willing to pay for.

pretty simple...

[Run4yourlives]

For most, simple CSS linked properly is good enough...

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="/style/standard.css" />

Be sure to hide all the big images as well.

If you have a big audience on cells or pda's, you may want to optimize it a little more, doing things like putting a menu right at the top of the page, lot's of "back to tops", etc.

Once again, you won't be doing any of this without standards.

Use CSS

[StonedRat]

If your site is written properly, i.e. using CSS for layout, then at the very least you can simply disable CSS for mobile visitors, not very pretty but doesn't block any content. The best option would be to have a style sheet with it's media set to handheld to tailor the content they see. Hide unnecessary stuff, and format the rest in a compact fashion:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css" />

Opera is useful for testing these styles (Shift+F11) and the Web developers toolbar [chrispederick.com] adds this feature to firefox. A very well made site compatible with handhelds is none other than opera.com [opera.com], everything on their site has a well optimised handheld version.

Best practices and theory

[Marxist Hacker 42]

The theory is, these devices are quite common, and more people would use them if more sites supported them. I like Google Mobile, I use a handful of other sites that are compatible, including Snapstream.net for Beyond TV (now that's a slick mobile site- it autodetects Windows CE and Pilot, and shrinks back to a subset that works wonderfully for finding a show you just heard about and scheduling it for recording to your home PC, which allows you to download it back to your device for later watching- completely cool closed loop).

Now for best practices- go light on the graphics, better if you MUST have pictures should be a link to the picture, not an IMG tag. Text only. Few people have the newer Windows Mobile 5.0 devices with the hi-res screen- think 240 pixels wide. These devices are great for vertical scrolling, bad for side scrolling. Keep entry to links or single field with a submit button- javascript may not work well, and typing is a real pain on these devices. Same idea with pictures- think 240x240 or 240x320 at most.

Re:*sigh*

[sych]

But this is exactly the direction WML/WAP has gone in - the old WML is gone, and they've moved to XHTML.

CSS and "accept" headers will decide how the page is rendered, but you basically don't need to write seperate pages anymore - just follow the standards, and the useragent will render it appropriately.