As more and more people use mobile phones, how do you ensure they can see your website on it?
Well, there's nothing magical about it. Most mobile phones can view sites using the same HTML that you would use for regular websites So it's very likely that people currently can see your website on their phone. However, mobile phones tend to intepret HTML standards much more harshly than other browsers, and mobile screens are tiny compared to a computer screen. So what your site looks like or whether anyone can actually use it on a phone is another story.
There's two possible ways to go to create a better mobile experience. You can optimize your current site so that it's more viewable by folks on a mobile phone. This would mean making sure your code is compliant with
XHTML standards and moving key content and navigation to the upper left -- so it's more likely to appear without a lot of scrolling. Highlighting the text that's currently selected is also very important for mobile phones, as it's often hard on these devices to tell exactly where your cursor is.
If people on mobile phones are a key part of your website audience, you'll be able to support them much better by making a mobile specific website. This would be a separate website, designed specifically for smaller screens, with less images and text, and to allow people to get the information they're likely to be looking for faster. You could either have a separate URL for your mobile site (like mobile.idealware.org), or you can try to detect that a user is accessing your site through a mobile device, and show them the mobile optimized site accordingly.
Want more information? Here's some good links:
Others have tips or links to share?
