There’s been a bit more discussion of my post about sites that don’t work well on mobile phones (here’s a good roundup of posts on the Windows Mobile News site). A lot of people assumed I was asking for Web designers to do a special site just for mobile phones. I was not.
See, there are a few simple things you can do to make your site work properly on a mobile phone. Like what? The biggest mistake I see most bloggers do is put their navigation div on top of their content div. Nasty cause that forces small screens to scroll down. One one site I visited tonight that took 43 seconds. I won’t embarrass that guy. I’ll film a video instead to show what I’m talking about since most of the comments I’ve gotten made me realize that many of my readers have never even considered reading a Web site on a cell phone.
It’s amazing just how much you can read on a two-inch screen. It’s also amazing how much better RSS is than Web sites. Why? No pretty logos to scroll through and no multi-column layouts to make text hard to read. Anyway, this isn’t something most bloggers can fix by themselves. They need blog templates that have thought about small phones.
Is this important? Well, come to CES and look at my phone.
Update: Ralph Whitbeck asks: “Who really browses on their cell phone anyways?”