Reviewing Mobile Web Sites

I must be in a mobile frame of mind this week as yesterday, I spent the most of my afternoon and evening looking at what are supposed to be the best mobile web sites. Instead, I was disappointed and didn’t even want to select the amount we’re required to vote on. Then I saw this announcement in Blue Flavored Blog stating the dotMobi Mobile Web Developers Guide is available, which includes best practices for mobile design.

Here are the notes I took indicating the problems with the mobile sites I reviewed:

Too much content up front before getting to the links. The content that appears before the links is useless. A lot of times it was an image, a logo, even both PLUS some blah blah text that tell the reader nothing. The best sites simply had their name at the top taking up little space followed by the choices. It was the plain and simple sites that did best.

Too many links. One site had 10 accesskeys (good) and then a bunch of links BEFORE the accesskeys menu. I had to scroll to get to the accesskeys, which is what most people would probably want when coming to this site.

The right amount of links, but no accesskeys. Accesskeys take little space and make movement much easier for those on devices without a keyboard. No reason to skip them.

Music. I couldn’t find one site with music that worked with either of my devices. One being the Dell Axim x51v, which has Windows Media Player. The other being the Sidekick. The sites specializing in music wouldn’t work with these. If I download and add software to the Dell, one site would work. This could be a problem with the handheld provider not offering a more global music player. But Windows Media? Shouldn’t that work?

Image overuse. Enough said. Useless. Slows down downloading.

Links to full sites. A site that’s specifically for mobile (it ends in .mobi) has links to full web sites. It wasn’t fun to discover this and then have to go back a page. It was a travel-based site and it linked to airline web sites. I stupidly assumed it would be mobile versions of these sites.

One site wanted Flash. None of the devices here has Flash capabilities. How many do? A couple of sites stated that the device was incompatible with the site. Another site that’s for mobile devices had lots of graphics and was a pain to navigate.

One news site did a great job with the links and providing short headlines that give you the story if you just want the highlights. You can go to the headline for the story… only here, someone forgot to create new paragraphs. The whole article was one big blob of text.

Long URLs. Um… isn’t this obvious?

[tags]web development,web design,mobile,mobi[/tags]