Companies like GoDaddy, AOL, Nokia, Microsoft, Google and AT&T all had a hand in creating the guidelines that aim to make the mobile web more accessible despite the differences in service providers or handsets.
While many studies show mobile web usage is rapidly increasing, many users have become frustrated that accessing the mobile web is cumbersome and counterintuitive, according to the W3C. Users have found common websites for shopping, email, sports and weather inaccessible or not as easy to use as their desktop PC. Because of a lack of guidelines, content providers have had difficulties building sites that work well on all types of mobile phones.
“There are many devices, but one web,” Daniel Appelquist, chair of the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, told WebProNews.com. “Practical guidelines on how to create content that can be delivered to the plethora of devices saves developers and organizations time and money.”
In response, the group has formed the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group Charter, which describes 60 points of best practices for mobile website publishers. The group’s mission, as described on its website, “is to enable the reach of the web to be easily extended onto mobile devices by providing guidelines, checklists and best practice statements which are easy to comprehend and implement.”
The group also has designed a seal called the mobileOK trustmark that signifies if the website is compliant with the group’s guidelines.
“Nokia believes the use of the web via mobile browsers will be the next big step towards making information and content available globally to everybody, including billions of people for whom their mobile phone will be their first and only means of Internet access,” Timo Ali-Vehmas, vice president of standardization and industry relations for Nokia, told WebProNews.com. “To achieve this it is important to provide the web community with the right set of tools to make it easier to deliver information and content in mobile-friendly way.”
According to a recent Nokia study, 63 percent of people have used their mobile phones to browse the web. Implementing standard design practices would eliminate annoyances such as frames, popups, imbedded objects or scripts, tables and auto-refreshes that would unnecessarily hinder one’s webbrowsing experience.
“While the best mobile browsers can provide a great internet experience for any content, it is more efficient and more effective when content has been designed to take account of basic design requirements, and these guidelines will help authors to ensure that their content works as well as possible on the entire Internet,” Opera’s Chief Standards Officer, Charles McCathieNevile said.
