Get mobile before someone steals your niche

I like being outside in the fresh air. In fact most of my holidays are spend wandering various countries around the world. But there are occasions when I need to communicate with the rest of the world. And a mobile phone or a PDA helps. The problem is, many websites don’t work too well on a mobile device. And with an increase in the number of mobile internet users, that’s a big potential market you can’t really ignore. So here’s a checklist for getting mobile.

1. Get rid of your tables. Real websites don’t need tables, they do it all in HTML and CSS. The absolute best sites work perfectly without CSS, Images and JavaScript. The simpler the site structure the more stable the site. If your site uses a 70opx wide structural table then don’t expect the site to do well on a 280px wide PDA screen.

2. Use semantic mark-up. What? All this means is that you should create a template with a logical structure: headers, lists and paragraphs. It should still work with CSS and images all turned off. If you like, it’s the site without any clothes on – all you get is the raw code without any of the frippery you employ to make it look pretty. It also means building a site without using javascript, layers, positioning and tables (again).

3. Small is good, tiny is better. Download speeds are getting better but still not quite as quick as your superfast home connection. The secret to fast downloads: send less data. So reduce the size of your pages. Clean out all the bloat, use external flies where possible for CSS and JavaScript, optimise all your images and make sure you use the minimum of words to pass on your message.

4. Chose your Mediatype. Create a new CSS file and call it handheld.css. Strip out everything that is unnecessary. That means all the backgrounds, navigation rollovers, font effects, borders, iframes and so on. None of this will work on all mobile devices so all you are doing is creating code clutter. Add the link to the CSS in your document head and that’s it, you’ve created a mobile website (almost). W3C introduction to mediatypes.

5. Validate your site. Yes I know, boring, boring boring. But necessary. Unless the site validates you are going spend twice a long debugging so it worth the extra pain now to avoid the hardship later.

6. Ignore Internet Explorer. Test your site with Firefox, Opera and Safari at a minimum. Use the Opera tools to see how the site looks without images, CSS, tables and so on. Once you have got it altogether test the site in IE. And make sure you look at IE6 and IE7 ‘cos they do thing differently (thanks MicroSoft). Now pick up up someone’s PDA or mobile phone and do the same again: test, test, test.

And if you implement all the above you have the added advantage that the site doesn’t need any extra tweaking to make it suitable for the mobile search listings.

That’s it. Nothing too strenuous, it just takes a bit of time and effort to make sure you don’t miss out on a potentially lucrative niche.