Drawar

Thank you! This is my third post today about such a subject.

I completely agree. Times are changing, and we need to keep up with them. We need to create sites that look acceptable on both high, and low resolutions. Mobile devices have opened a whole new can of worms to feed, and it's our responsibility to make sure they eat well.

That is not to say you need to drop support for your 1280*1024 users. Not at all. Adding support for these new devices is all a matter of proper design, and proper use of CSS. CSS has the @media rule, and has the handheld media device; Use it.

Duplicate post of above. Please ignore.

The big question is:

Does the iPhone recognise the mobile stylesheet protocol?

If so, once it's launched, I'll write a stylesheet to accomodate it as best I can. Otherwise, its using Safari, and users can use the zoom feature to zoom in on my content. The way my site is currently designed, it should work out fairly well for the zoom feature.

We'll see once these phones are not just available, but cost effective, I guess.

There's a lot more to take into account when designing for mobile. Just like designing for no-screen internet browsers, you have to realize that a cell phone is an entirely different interface. Not only do you have to deal with small screens and slow download times, you need to make your website accessible to an interface device with no mouse, limited key entry, and little scripting capabilities. I wouldn't hold my breath for standardization either.

Even with a big step in the right direction, the web is still a long way from being a cross-platform resource. The best of luck to you, designers.

I wouldn't want to strain my eyes on a mobile just to surf the web. Nor would I want to change my layout to suit mobiles. Surely anyone who has the technology to surf the internet using their mobile, surely they have a internet connection at home, even if it may be basic. They can just use that.

Excellent writeup. I was thinking about this the other day as well and have even added, "make site mobile friendly," on my to do list. I'm still contemplating it because I'm not sure if my site is one that you would want to visit on a mobile device, but I want to play nice just in case someone decided to.

I've also noticed that I'm starting to browse websites on my phone much more than I used to. Yesterday, for example, I was with my friends at Borders bookstore. We were in the movies section and suddenly had the urge to catch a movie at the theater. I pulled out my phone, headed to Google, and looked up showtimes ("movies: zipcode"). My brother did too, but he tried going to Fandango or something, which unfortunately did not work on his phone. I also checkup on buzz every now and then with the mobile version of Popurls and mobile version of Original Signal.

Thanks for writing on this topic. Maybe it's just the push I was needing to get working on a mobile version of my site!

I do notice that I browser on my mobile phone alot more than I used to. I also consider myself somewhat of a techie, which seems that the average person is not.

I don't think it's a bad idea to make sure your site looks good on a mobile device, but it doesn't seem practical as a standard yet. Especially for a client project, and if their main audience isn't catered towards techie people who might carry mobile devices. Then it's a waste of time/money developing for such devices that aren't practical for the users.

I don't think that it's the designers/developers who are holding things back, and we (as a community) will realize when the time is right to start doing it more. I mean, who else are the companies going to look to in order to get this done?

But it's never a bad time to start learning about it, and how it works.

I'm with Teej on the philosophical argument here. Anyone who thinks they can design ONE style that befits both a desktop user and mobile user has missed the point of accessibility entirely.

Use a mobile device to surf the web, and get a feel for what's easy to do and what isn't. There are plenty of layouts that "fit" a mobile browser, but are a pain to navigate because you don't have a mouse, full keyboard, and large enough viewing area.

What a lot of designers are doing in an attempt to get their default layouts to work on mobile devices is in effect creating legibility, not accessibility. The site looks fine, but it's not condusive to the tools of a mobile device. An entirely separate sheet is the way to go.

cww, yes, a different style sheet may be the way to go, but you can do it in a way that still looks much like your computer based layout.

I think I get what everyone is mostly saying, we can make the web site more legible but it is going to be almost impossible to make it more usable because of the restrictions that a mobile phone has. Save for the Treos, Blackberrys and iPhones that are going to have touch screen.

So does everyone think that the mobile phones of the future are all going to be touch screen or something to that effect (something better as yet undeveloped) to account for the lack of usability on the web with mobile phones?

No, I don't really think that it being a touch screen has much to do with it. I'm sure there are ways of making phones to up the usability on mobile devices. The software has alot to do with it as well.