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I am wondering what changes ( if any ) that I should consider making to a website to make it more friendly to mobile devices. I am focusing mainly on use in landscape mode. I know i can remove sidebars and that type of think but I am more interested in some simple and basic adjustments rather than fully accommodating mobile use ( in other words i estimate a low use of the site in mobile and there is not a budget to develop a dedicated mobile site/app ). I guess I already know about fallback images for flash and maybe increasing text size but is there anything else ?

byronyasgur
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For Android friendliness, check out the myriad tips suggested here: Tips for optimizing a website for Android's browser?

For iOS friendliness, this blog post has some good tips: Designing an iPhone-friendly Website

Community
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PengOne
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    +1 Only thing I would say is I would keep they styles all together with my main CSS, as the extra call back is not worth the space saved. – Andrew Sep 21 '11 at 17:36
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The primary concern is to have it display reasonably well scaled, for which you will need to use the viewport tag. Other than that you'll need to worry about the various javascript/css inconsistencies between webkit, safari, etc.

Also, since the user is likely to be on a weak connection, you should go back to 1990s style concern over your code and image weight. Try to keep things as light as possible to reduce download times. The rule of thumb used to be, no individual page should be larger than 100k.
This may be controversial, but in my opinion you should avoid using frameworks (jquery, etc) that download a ton of functions, of which you then use practically none. Unless your site is really dependent on it, just write your own functionality and save the bandwidth.

And of course if iPhone is your concern (or any iOS device) then Flash is a non-starter.

Yevgeny Simkin
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  • good tips - actually is there an easy way of not including jquery etc for these devices – byronyasgur Sep 21 '11 at 19:20
  • I think you can grab the user agent and then document write the SCRIPT tag based on whether or not the browser matches, but I don't want to swear to if that would work... hopefully someone will chime in, if they've done this – Yevgeny Simkin Sep 21 '11 at 19:34
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I would suggest to use as little dynamic elements as possible. Avoid things like divs with inner scrolling.

In the end it is important to test your site on a touch controlled device because that's the main difference.

Mats Hofman
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