It is important to understand that when you are creating a mobile version of your website, you only want to capture the essential data that mobile searchers are looking for.  When people are looking for your website on a mobile device, they are looking for quick information that they need in a hurry.  Include the following on your mobile website:

• Abbreviated home page content
• Simplified contact form
• Phone number
• Map and address
• Main product or service information

Including only the important information will give users of all mobile devices a good user experience, regardless of the type of device.  Even smart phones have their limitations as to what types of content they can display properly.  It is especially important to have a good mobile website if your main site is comprised of Flash technology.  Currently no mobile device has the capability to display flash based websites.  A flash website appears to be broken when viewed on a mobile device, leaving the user with little options to get in contact with you, or view your services or products.

Have you ever wondered how to test a website designed for mobile phones? There are a couple of sites that can be of great help to test for websites designed for mobile phones. When creating a site to be viewed in a small screen, it is important to make a simple design, it will be easier to fix when testing, for good performance.

When creating a mobile website for the first time it is good to look at other websites that have been designed for mobile phones, this provides you with ideas of how to create a site. A way to view mobile websites in a computer is by using a Firefox plug-in called User Agent Switcher, this plug-in allows you to add user agents of mobile phones you would like to test your website on or view someone else’s website. After you have your design in mind and you have implemented it, you can begin testing the site. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides a mobileOK Checker that checks if a mobile website is mobile friendly. The site url that is placed on this site to be checked will return a result ranging from 0 to 100, 100 being the most mobile friendly site. Another site you can use to check for performance is mobiReady.com; this site uses the W3C mobileOk and also provides device emulators to check how a site looks. 

After fixing the errors on your site, you can continue to check the site look and feel in more devices. There is an application called Keynote, which provides a wide range of user agents and an emulator to view your site. The application also shows the code being used, the access time for each individual page, any syntax warnings, among a lot of other useful information.

It is important to keep in mind a website that loads faster will be more user-friendly and when it comes to mobile websites this factor is very important. When it comes to SEO, it is important to make sure your site has GA coding to help its ranking position as well as adding content that contains special keywords.

When creating a mobile site you need to keep in mind that there are multiple types of mobile phones being use and each will display the site differently. The best way to create your site is by customizing the site for devices whose web browser capabilities are considerably lower than newest phones such as the iphone, G3, among others.

To start creating a mobile site you will need to decide how many pages the site will consist of, and if these are to be any images. How much content are you going to include. Keep in mind that the information will be viewed on a small screen. All the content should be in small paragraphs and avoid placing to much information on the individual pages. If you plan on using pictures, which I would recommend that you avoid as much as possible, make sure that the images are small in size and will not take too much loading time. After all these important factors have been decided, you can start creating you mobile site.

When creating the template for your mobile site, make sure you use div tags instead of tables. This will allow more flexibility in the design and it will be easier to customize the site for different types of mobile phones. The best way to customize your mobile site is to have a script that will check the type of phone that is viewing the site. When doing this, you can customize individual style sheets that will use more or less images, styles, etc.

When your template is created, you should consider adding a page with dynamic content such as twits from Twitter or posts from a blog. This will give your mobile site a better SEO standing.
Mobile devices will continue to grow and improve their web browser capabilities and because of this, it is important to have a flexible design which can be customize to fit various types of devices.