To add to my pervious post on mobile news sites, here’s some solid advice from A List Apart on  the benefit of going mobile-specific in design.

"Ideally, site authors would be able to meet the growing demand for a quality mobile experience without changing a line of code. But the reality is that a site designed specifically with mobility in mind will always provide a much better user experience to mobile users, even when they are equipped with the device du jour. It’s not merely a question of network costs and delays or memory and CPU limitations. Rather, the mobile experience merits its own design, as discussed in a growing body of literature, including the W3C’s very own Mobile Web Best Practices, released in July 2008 as a W3C Recommendation."

(I had written about the W3C’s Mobile Web Best Practices in an earlier post.)

The article by Dominique Hazaël-Massieux then goes explain, "If you’re just getting started with mobile design, you may face a number of hurdles, including the cost or technical challenge of designing and maintaining a second site—or a simple lack of understanding of how people on the go might use your site," and then deals with handling a key element in this effort -  using CSS to maximize interoperability across platforms.

There could be no better starting point to get an idea of the some of the issues involved in getting your pages render optimally on mobile screens. Whether or not you ending up writing stylesheets, you will get to know about some interesting ways of handling some of the issues that crop up in the process.

Related post: A new ‘mobile OK checker’