PS&L Blog

I had a client call me a few weeks ago and ask me about creating a mobile style sheet for their site. He wanted their website to “work and be optimized on mobile devices.” This is not as easy as it seems.  Developing a single style sheet that magically renders a site perfectly on every Smart Phone, Cell Phone and PDA, while retaining the layout a functionality of the site, well, we’re just not there yet. (You’d be better off saving your time and money for a rainy day.)

This wasn’t the first time I heard this request, and it certainly won’t be the last, so here is an overview and the approach we recommend (as I did with this client) to solve the mobile device dilemma.

It’s safe to say that mobile devices are here to stay, and with new generations of devices like the Android, iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., these devices deliver a web browsing experience that is similar to what we are used to when using our laptops and desktops. But, until such a time that A) all of our users have these devices, or B) there is a common standard in mobile browsing on all types of phones, we need to approach this development cautiously .

With desktop computers, we know visitors are using a PC or a MAC (if you’re one of the lucky ones) with either IE, Firefox, Safari, or others.  All of these browsers render HTML and CSS similarly, if not identically. What’s more, we know the desktop is going to be able to handle a web layout that is optimized for a screen size or 1024×768. And lastly, we know that they are most likely connected to the web via cable or DSL.

This relative consistency unfortunately is not the case with the “mess” that are mobile devices. These devices are all over the place. We have smart phones, cell phones, full screen phones, and  PDAs. All of them have varying screen sizes, use different browsers (with varying standards and support among those browsers), and these browsers are very finicky in how they handle Javascript, CSS and media. And if this isn’t bad enough, they all connect to the Internet differently, most connecting over much slower networks than our desktops.

So, as a higher ed marketing and enrollment person, what should you do?

My recommendation is to leave your main website alone, or if you are in the process of designing a new site, forget about mobile devices for the time being. This main site will service 99.5% of your visitors as is. Don’t dumb down your main website in hopes of being able to develop a single site that will service both desktop (traditional) and mobile viewers. Remember,  there is no fancy coding or CSS that will enable a site to serve both audiences well.

For the best user experience, you should develop a separate site that leverages your existing content but is optimized for mobile devices. Optimized not only from an interface and layout standpoint (to work with small screens 480 x 320, 320 x 480, etc.), but also from an Information Architecture (IA) standpoint. This means you will (probably) have to reorganize the structure of the mobile site, incorporating fewer links and less choices, but the end result will be much deeper in terms of drill down.  Obviously the site will need to be pared down in terms of technology – no AJAX, Flash, video, etc.

In my next blog post I will talk about what this mobile site should look like, a little about traditional mobile users and how their usage should influence your web marketing decisions.