Best Practices for Information Sites
4/8/2010
The following bulleted list explains some important points that you should consider as you design your information Web site:
- Information Web sites are perfect for offline browsing.
Avoid everything that is not supported offline, such as form fields, large bitmaps, or excessive advertisements. Many news Web sites or information Web sites ask for comments about a given article. Because these comments require the user to post information back to the server, an offline user does not receive the same experience as an online user. However, you can add a mailto link on the Web page because the Windows Mobile software supports sending e-mail messages offline. - Concentrate on the basic content.
Do not show any links that users of Internet Explorer Mobile are unlikely to view, such as large picture slide shows. - Use introductory pages instead of continuously linked Web pages.
Many news Web sites and information Web sites create short Web pages of the articles and then point to the continuations with "Click here to read more." links at the bottoms of the Web pages. This practice is not very useful for Internet Explorer Mobile in an offline scenario. Most users of mobile devices do not change their link depth in Internet Explorer Mobile favorites very frequently. Instead of creating "Click here to read more" links, it is better to create short introductory Web pages that contain links to all the Web pages of the articles. Such Web pages still require users to change to a link depth of one, but make it more obvious that users must do so. You can even add hints on the introductory Web pages telling users which link depth to enter in their synchronization option.
See Also
Concepts
Other Resources
Designing Web Sites for Windows Mobile Devices
Internet Explorer Mobile Overview
Mobile Web Site Design Overview