The Official Internet Marketing Sweetie Blog

Thursday, February 8, 2007

Is your website PDA-friendly?

I’ve done a lot of Internet surfing with my cell phone and it’s interesting to see how websites function and appear. If you have your navigation on the left, you’ll likely be giving your users a whole lot to scroll before they can get your content. Data in columns can also get skewed making it tough to decipher.

Big companies like Citibank North America are coming on board and realizing that they need to be friendly to tiny little digital devices that are growing in popularity. Although more and more companies are making their websites more mobile friendly, there are still many that haven’t got it. It’s wise to start worrying about how your site looks to your handheld visitors just as much as those with a desktop or laptop.

I found the following article that gives you some tips on making your website more handheld device friendly. Make Your Site Mobile Friendly in Two Minutes

Have you thought about what your website looks like to those who access it via mobile devices other than their laptops? Or, are you ahead of the game and have already configured your site to be PDA friendly? If so, I’d love to hear some tips from you.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting. I never thought of that.

8:57 PM  
Blogger Lynette said...

It's funny you mentioned this I have been putting together a quick info about this - it's not only PDA's but more and more phones should be supported. I used to use a plugin for my site that re-format the content to basically text.

But beyond going that far, at the most basic level, I think it's also it's very important to create websites that validate and to use XHMTL.

10:18 AM  
Blogger Alice said...

Do you really see the validation issue? From the PDA/phone browsers I've used, I haven't seen that. As long as the code shows as readable text, it seems to be fine with me.

It's mostly issues with the dynamic components of a site that I have had trouble with. For example, radio buttons, drop-down boxes and visual confirmation on forms.

And of course, the layout of the site is an issue. Particularly, left-hand navigation that takes forever to go through.

I also originally thought tables were a problem, but when I look at most sites that I know are using tables, I have no issues. I'm wondering if it's css that lays out text in table format that can actually be the problem. Which is interesting since the W3C recommends using CSS over tables, yet I've never seen a browser with trouble with tables. But perhaps, there's an error in CSS code where I'm seeing things go all wonky.

7:13 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Let me add to my comments - I mean any validation issues outside of a faster-loading page, which is definitely important on these types of browsers?

7:18 PM  

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