Future Proofing Mobile Websites

Link to us: http://sn.im/27h5mr

We've been talking about Web 3.0 from a general perspective all this while but what about the mobile devices like smart phones? With emerging operating systems like Android, Apple iOS, and Windows Mobile the number of users on the Web are bound to increase tenth fold. Which is why it's important for web developers to begin making their websites more compatible with these devices.

A few ideas that will prepare your site are:

• Making sure your mobile version site contains user agent detection such as WP-Touch which can prompt a mobile-formatted CSS of your standard site or redirect it to a mobile friendlier version in your sub domain or directory.
  
  
• Provide an option switch back to a standard web version (without the Web 3.0 features)

• Do not block Googlebot-Mobile within your robots.txt. It checks the Doc Type in deciding inclusion into mobile site index, like for example if you used the XHTML Mobile or Compact HTML type.

• Avoid using pixels and absolute rendering, a process of generating an image from scene files which are in computer codes. You can choose percentage or relative.

• Hyper linked text should be minimized for clearer viewing and visual reasons.

• Make buttons larger when hovered over. Mobile users don't appreciate having to realign their thumb to select something. Currently there are 2 types of touch screen technologies, resistive and capacitive. Resistive touch screen requires pin point contact with the tip of a finger or a stylus whereas capacitive (iPhone) needs a larger surface contact with the screen, i.e your thumb.
  

• Submit your website to W3C for verification and MobiReady to test load time and mobile device rendering.

These are some ways that can prepare a site for the next generation Web and Devices. Would you start surfing the web more on mobiles devices when these implementations roll out?

Reference:

Raven, [ONLINE], Retrieved 12th Feb 2011.
URL: http://raventools.com/blog/mobile-seo-preparation-for-a-semantic-web/