The Differences of Mobility

Nearly half of all mobile Internet users use mobile Web sites only to find
tidbits of immediately useful information. Mobile surfers don’t usually surf
just for the fun of being on the Internet — they save major surfing for when
they can sit at a computer and see pages displayed more than a few words
at a time. In part, that’s because mobile Web sites are usually pretty poorly
designed still, despite the fact that the mobile Web has been around for
awhile now.
It’s hard to get the hang of how a Web site should appear on a cell phone
screen. Many Web site owners make the mistake of designing their Web site
for the computer screen and then enabling it for mobile phones without
changing site design. You can do that, but the results won’t be the most
useful site a mobile surfer comes across.
Enabling your site for mobile users is easy — for the most part. In most
cases, it requires a small switch in the encoding of your Web site from HTML
(HyperText Markup Language) to XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup
Language) or another mobile-enabled Web design language.
Some mobile applications, however, require PHP — hypertext processor (I
have no clue how the popular acronym gained the first P). PHP is a serverside
processing language because scripts (or applications) are run from the
server rather than from the computer that the application appears on. This
makes it much easier to have rich programming on Web sites, which doesn’t
depend on the computer a visitor may be using.
Because of the way it works, PHP makes creating rich, detailed mobile Web
sites a much easier process. The cool part is that if you have a Web site written
in HTML or XHTML, changing it to PHP is often as easy as changing the
extension of the files that make up the site from .htm to .php. Really.
Well, okay, it sounds easy enough. Now for a reality check — I’ve seriously
oversimplified the considerations that go into creating mobile Web sites. The
fact remains that if your site is built for display on a computer screen, mobile
users won’t have the same experience. For example, Figure 10-1 shows how
a list of links might look on a mobile Web page. Keep in mind that there’s no
mouse on a mobile phone, so users have to scroll through every link on the
page until they get to the one they want to follow.
Simply changing the extension on an existing site built for the Internet also
doesn’t do justice to the pages that display on mobile phones. Much of the
graphics and functionality of the site is lost during the translation to a mobile
format, so while the extension change allows you to quickly enable the text
and links on your site for mobility, it doesn’t make the site pretty or even
completely useful.
The hardware restraints faced by most mobile users also create serious
issues. You have to go into creating a Web site with the thought of making it
available to the largest audience possible. That’s just a fact of mobile life, and
as more and more mobile adoptions take place, the mobile surfer is more of a
consideration. That means making your site friendly for both mobile and nonmobile
surfers.