The W3C, the body that mandates web standards, had come out with a set of Mobile web best practice guidelines some weeks ago. Meant to guide those who design and deliver content for mobile websites, the guidelines should be of particular interest to managers of news websites because some of the general principles involved may be applicable to all kinds of websites, mobile or not.

Designers are in pretty tricky terrain when they design pages for mobile phones, just because the extent of support that they offer to the different features that go into the rendering of a modern site can be hugely varied. As these guidelines indicate, mobile browsers can be inconsistent in their support for fonts, colour and tables and so on (HTML and CSS). Screen sizes and resolutions can be nightmarishly different. LCD screens do not render colours in a uniform manner. Keyboard types can range from the rudimentary to the sophisticated.

Image source: W3C

These guidelines for the mobile web are very handy and the W3C has made them handier still by putting them on neat flip cards - they have been summarized in ten broad thematic cards. You might understand the guidelines even if you do not have much of technical knowledge, the W3C folks have done a good job in presenting them in a simple manner.

Here’s a summary of the key points:

Design for ‘One Web’: Content designed with diverse devices in mind reduces cost, increases flexibility, and reaches the needs of more people.

Rely on Web standards: In the highly fragmented market of devices and browsers, standards are the best guarantee for interoperability.

Stay away from known hazards: Thoughtful design can help reduce usability problems due to small screens and keyboards, and other features of mobile devices.Hazards! May sound familiar, some of these: they include pop ups, using tables for layout and nested tables, using graphics for spacing and using frames and image maps.

Be cautious of device limitations: When choosing to use a particular Web technology, consider that mobile devices vary greatly in capability.

(I will touch on the remaining recommendations in my next post, tomorrow.)