Now that mobile phones are so widely used, creating mobile phone web pages is a challenge for many developers. Taking the obvious problem of screen size, mobile phone web design that produces pages that can be easily read is extremely important. Since most of the limitations regarding location have been overcome due to faster CPU speeds, larger memories and improved radio communications, accessing online data is now well within the capabilities of many mobile phones.

Many people who access the Internet on their PC at home can now access these same pages from their PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), or their mobile phone while traveling between work and home. Designers should bear in mind that the information they display on a larger screen might not display all that well when scaled down to display on a smaller one.

Most of today’s web pages have been written and tested on the wide color monitors attached to desktop PC’s. Despite the fact that the modern mobile phone has seen great technological advances, their screens have remained fairly small, which places a limit on how much they can display. More thought is therefore required on how to design web pages for viewing on mobile phones.

Some of the factors to be considered for a mobile website are: the amount of color information (16 or 32 bit), slower text input, the lack of a pointing device which limits user interaction, many portable devices can only scroll vertically, the devices often use soft keys for commands, data transfer is slower, data storage is limited and each packet of data transferred has to be paid for.

To add to this, users of mobile devices prefer using short URL’s which require less typing. Longer text links are acceptable as they can be seen easily and are easy to select. Avoid placing navigation controls at the top of the page. Don’t fill the screen with many different sizes and styles of text and do not overuse underlining and italics.

Make use of small images on the page. The phone is able to zoom in on images but keeping them small saves on the time taken to download them. Displaying large images can draw attention away from the message that is being delivered. Large images should not be placed at the top of a page as it is tedious to wait while they download before any data that is informative can arrive.

The design characteristics of mobile web pages have been examined by this article. The following is a summary of the findings. Readability is a primary objective for a small screen. Choose colors, fonts and alignment very carefully. The order of the document should be well thought out, and last but not least, use images that are suitable for displaying on small screens.