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When I was young my grandfather had a cell phone the size of a rolling suitcase. It weighed an estimated 5kg and had very poor battery performance. These days children get their own cell phones before they reach secondary school. Cell phones are with us everywhere, and we spend a lot of time to get updated on more or less important things on the Internet.

Websites designed for large screens can be a pain to navigate on mobile devices such as iPhones. Webdesigners should therefore consider creating alternative layouts to ensure optimal user experience for users on the move.

There is much to think about when designing for mobile devices. A List Apart has compiled many of these thoughts in a brilliant article which can be found here. I think this sums up some of the most important:

Mobile users operate in a very different usage context than PC users, and providing them with an experience customized to their needs is likely to be the best service you can offer to them.

Simulate the iPhone browser on your computer

If you don’t have an iPhone, you can easily simulate how any website will appear in a mobile browser just by using Safari (click on the links for screenshots):

1. Open Safari and click “Preferences”
2. Select “Advanced” and check the “Show Develop menu in menu bar”
3. Select Developer in the menu bar and click “User Agent> Mobile Safari 3.0 – iPhone”
4. Type any URL and see how the website will appear on an iPhone

Voila! Your web pages will appear as they would appear on an iPhone.

As you can see on these screendumps, BBC, CNN, and this blog has (at least) one thing in common: They have a customized layout for iPhone users:

Easy to install plugin for WordPress

If your site is powered by WordPress, you can customize the layout for various mobile devices with a few keystrokes. The plugin WPtouch iPhone Theme allows you to make a range of settings and can customize the layout automatically for smartphone, blackberry, android, iPhone and others.

Is your website a breeze to browse on iPhones, smartphones or androids?

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.