Monday 18 May 2015

The Basics Of Designing A Mobile Website

                                         
Who doesn't want a mobile website? With the pace at which mobile users are continuing to grow, it is only a matter of time before mobile sweeps the entire demography of the earth. And as the sales continue to rise, the costs continue to plummet. With the Wireless application protocol (WAP) introduced long back, customers have no problem accessing the same websites that they access on their desktops on their mobile phones.

But designing for a normal website and designing for a mobile-optimized one are not the same. This brings us to our fundamental question. What are the major differences when it comes to building a mobile website?

First, the mobile internet is not fundamentally different from the web in that the gateway retrieves the pages the user requested for from the web. Later, these pages are converted into a phone readable format.


Now to the differences or limitations in building a mobile website:

1. Normally, we are used to using tables to design a website. This however, is not possible in designing a mobile website as only cascading style sheets can be used to design the layout.

2. Secondly, there is a difference as to the usage of characters as only characters encoded using the UTF-8 standard will be accepted by the browsers of mobile phones.

3. Importantly, only Extended HTML (XHTML) And Extensible Markup language (XML) can be used for hardcoding the design of the pages.

4. Now, each phone has its own specific size and therefore you need to pay attention to the page resolution which doesn't usually exceed 120 pixels.

5. Images play an important role when it comes to designing mobile phones and here comes the major difference. A mobile website would accept only GIF and JPEG image formats.

6. Embedding Flash, images or providing links to videos or PDFs may be a part of normal web design, but are a strict no-no for mobile websites. As a mobile page is written in pure HTML, you cannot do any of the above and instead will have to code it in.

7. Last but not the least, you need a content editor to design the user interface of your mobile website.

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