MOBILE WEBSITE BUILDING IN QATAR

With the mobile phone becoming an essential part of our daily lives, it is not surprising that many predict mobiles to be the most dominant internet browsing platform. According to a recent statistic, approximately 30% of mobile phone users (which makes up more than 700 million and counting) have browsed and do browse the internet via their mobiles. Considering the fact that there are more than 2.5 billion mobile phone users, with the figure increasing by thousands every day, it makes sense to assume the increasing need for mobile websites.

Many proactive, consumer-driven companies have realized the importance of mobile websites and have, consequentially, built their own mobile compatible websites. Some may find this need to create a whole new website for mobiles unnecessary assuming websites can be accessed using mobile web browsers via WAP. However, these individuals are ignorant of the fact that most websites cannot properly load on mobile web browsers, given the size of the normal websites. Therefore, there is a need to carefully design and build an additional website which is accessible via mobile phones or other similar portable devices.

DESIGNING A MOBILE WEBSITE:

For beginners, the website design used for creating your desktop website is not compatible on the mobile web browsing platform. There are accessibility design guidelines for mobile websites which are set by the W3C. As mobile phones make use of WAP for web browsing, the websites need to be created accordingly in terms of screen size and download limit. The easiest way of building a mobile website is making necessary changes to the existing desktop website design to make it mobile compatible. However, just because you are making use of an existing website design does not mean there won’t be a lot of work. Big changes would be required in terms of website layout, design, and construction.
Some basic pointers for mobile website designs are as follows:

1. Get Dreamweaver CS3 and Adobe Creative Suite 3 which has Adobe Device Central
2. Launch Dreamweaver CS3 and from the ‘Create New’ option, click on ‘More’
3. Form the Page Type button, select HTML. Then publish out with the use of XHTML Mobile 1.0 profile, found under Doc Type.
4. Begin coding your HTML-based mobile website. It is best to keep the website simple by concentrating more on the content rather than the design and other perks. A quick search online can help you find some of the best HTML codes for mobile websites.
5. After the coding is complete, test the website. However, do not test within the browser. After choosing ‘Preview in Browser’, click on Adobe Device Central from the menu, and change the interface to mobile rather than desktop. From the Adobe Device Central, you can manually select a target device for your mobile cards, or you can create a custom device profile which will include the devices you wish to make your mobile cards compatible to.
6. After that, you can load the code and make your mobile cards available for the devices you have chosen.
7. For simplicity, code your website using XML or XHTML, with UTF-8 as the character encoding.
8. Make sure the website is viewable on different screen sizes as the screen size varies from mobile to mobile. This can be hard to accomplish, but it is doable.
9. Convenience is the top most priority as it is tedious and time-consuming to browse through the website using mobile web browsers. Therefore, it is important to keep all the important and relevant information on top of the webpage.
10. Include radio buttons or lists for better usability of the website when viewers are adding text.
11. If you want to include pictures on your mobile webpage, they should be in the JPEG or GIF format.
12. Most mobile web browsers do not have back buttons; therefore, including back buttons and relevant, easily accessible links can make your mobile website very user-friendly.
13. The maximum page size is 20 kilobytes. It is highly essential to include all the necessary information within the page size limit.
14. You should refrain from including anything which is unnecessary or useless, as viewers are paying web browsing money to their providers in order to view the website.
15. Avoid using tables as the main website layout as it will not be able to be properly viewed via mobile web browsers. Instead, use CSS for the layout for maximum compatibility.