Designing a site that will display consistently across multiple handsets is difficult, but understanding and sticking to web standards will bring you closer to this goal.
Design your site so that the information your users want is not only on display, but also easy to get to. The limited screen space is valuable, so you can’t necessarily have the full site navigation on every page. The information architecture of your site is therefore essential to ensuring you make the most logical use of navigation in line with what your site visitors need. There are benefits to mobile development that can help you get around this.
Standards
There are few mobile standards currently in place. Creating content (including images, text and beyond) that can be correctly formatted on most phones (or at least legible on phones where formatting is flawed) is still not entirely possible. There is therefore a certain amount of trial and error involved in designing a mobile site. The process is certainly worth it, though, considering that there are 3.4 billion unique mobile phones, and a fair number of these are accessing the mobile web
(International Telecommunication Union, 2013).
Mobile handset emulators allow you to see how your work-in-progress website will be formatted, depending on which device you are emulating. It has been suggested that nothing can replace testing on actual mobile devices, so if you are doing the testing, recruit contacts with different handsets to show you the difference in display.
Some emulators:
• Test iPhone – www.testiphone.com
• BlackBerry – www.blackberry.com/developers/downloads/simulators
• Mobile Phone Emulator – for Samsung, iPhone, BlackBerry and others www.mobilephoneemulator.com
