When creating a mobile website, several adjustments or considerations need to be made.  Obviously, you don’t just port your current website, optimized for a monitor, over to a mobile site.

You need to build the site as if you were building a site for dial-up users.  The download/upload speeds on smart phones are not yet comparable to the speed of a broadband connection.  Image sizes need to be minimized and html simplified.

The page layout needs to be more vertical than the page design for display on a monitor.  The user on a smart phone will be scrolling up and down to look at the page and the screen resolution is not very wide.  Also, the page length should be kept as short as possible to avoid long, endlessly scrolling pages.

Applications need to keep this rule in mind also.  The forms should only contain a few fields of data entry because it is more difficult to enter data on a phone than a keyboard and the load times will be slower.

The most important consideration, I feel is to make sure that what you put on a mobile makes sense for the user to use.  An obvious example is that you wouldn’t put an application on a mobile site that requires the user to print a page.  Less obvious is applications that can be built with all the other requirements in mind, but don’t consider whether the user will use them or not, don’t consider the process.  We can build a mobile site that has the full features of our Find a Doctor application, including the ability to compare physicians and request appointments, but we realized that a patient would not be doing that on their phone.  A patient would be looking up a doctor’s phone number, location, office hours, etc.  

So that’s what we built:  http://mobile.eCommunity.com.

Take a look at the site and see if you agree or disagree with what I’ve said here, or have comments about the site.