At the moment I’m looking at mobile web development. With mobile carriers increasingly trying to tempt consumers to use the mobile web by offering unlimited Internet usage plans a major barrier has been removed. Previously people were worried about how much the data was going to cost making it very inaccessible. Now that this barrier is coming down the next major barrier is the web sites themselves.
Currently sites are either not available for mobile devices or the ones that are are not very well designed or just look very dull with a few notable exceptions such as the BBC and Google. But be warned: creating your own mobile website is a minefield if you don’t take into account the various limitations of mobile devices such as:
- input methods which are not the same as desktops (no mouse, fiddly keypads, touchscreens)
- processing power and memory of devices
- Bandwidth limitations of mobile networks
I have been looking at this recently and am currently messing around with the standards and different phones. I have found a really good articles and tutorial if you are looking at creating your own web mobile site:
- For designing your website: #Mobilforge#
- For XHTML tutorial: #Openwave#
Other exciting technologies for mobile websites are using PHP and AJAX. I currently haven’t looked at these but intend to in the near future.
