Many parties have done a great effort in making dos and don’ts, rules and best practices when making mobile portals. Here’s mine, only four of them…

Gap, .mob, w3c and more are all good advice! Thats not the point. But it does not matter if you use access keys, tables absolute measures or not. Some times you have to. What matters is understanding the mobile environment and beeing in control of how the service is persented the end user.

So, I have made my own guidelines. Four of them.

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Be true to the mobile context

Dont believe that you can copy your content, strategy or design from your desktop portal.

Utilize the characteristics of the mobile channel

Use the unique characteristics to overcome the limitations. Not only device capabilities but also network- and user characteristics.

Take measure to decrease data cost and load time

Datacost is the main reason people are not using your mobile portal. So do all in your power to decrease the ammount of data the user have to download. See my blogpost at dev.mobi for tips and tricks. If fast web applications are important on web, its extremely important here.

Be in control over presentation

Don’t let transcoders, proxies or handsets mess with how your content is presented to the user! You know both your content and your users best! You should decide!