The world is going mobile. As if you hadn’t noticed.

As the progression from desktop computer to laptop to smart phone proceeds unabated, it is important to understand the limitations of each device and to be able to reach out to your audience in a way that makes it easy for them. Today, we discuss web-enabled smart phones.

Most smart phones can render HTML pages and because the screens on mobile devices are so small, viewing an entire web page becomes inconvenient or even impossible. Plus, bandwidth and microprocessor power limitations on mobile devices make web surfing frustratingly slow.

What to do?

Design the web page for the device. Great examples are cnn.com and ebay.com. These sites optimize content for small screens. They use narrow columns and smaller graphics and refrain from using Flash and scripting to make browsing fast and easy.

How do they know that you are viewing the page on a mobile device?

Typing google.com in a browser on your desktop will direct you to the familiar home page for Google. Type in the same web address on an iPhone and Google knows to present a page perfectly formatted to the small screen.

When the mobile device makes a request to the browser for a page, it tells the web server a bit of information about itself. We can then program the web browser to choose the mobile version of the web page or the standard page. For example, when a mobile browser visits bustercreative.com, they are redirected to our mobile site.

If you believe providing mobile content is valuable to your clients, we can help. We’d recommend starting small and adding content as your needs and budget allows. Call us to find out more.