Last week we talked about QR Codes extensively. QR Codes are great unless you take your user to a site that doesn't work well on a phone. Then it could be detrimental to you.
Smart Phone Specs
The iPhone4 has arguably the best display out there so we will use that for our conversation. The screen on the iPhone 4 is 3.5 inches measured diagonally and is 960 x 640 pixels. That means if your site is 960 pixels or thinner (which most sites are) your site is going to fit in the entire width of the iPhone screen.
Give me an idea, what does that look like?
I used a screen capture of today's Active Rain home page. The image you see pictured is what shows up on the home page after you scroll down enough so that the address bar disappears. Now Active Rain is one of the better ones for handling smart phone dimensions, even though I think it could be even better if actually formatted for a phone output.
So the question is, how does one read that page? Of course, you have to expand the page. But why make your user do all of the work when you can do it for them. Make your web site truly mobile friendly and create a web site for the mobile browser. What does it look like in comparison?
Before you ask, the image at the bottom is actually cropped smaller than the image at the top. I did this to illustrate how a mobile enabled site matches up to a flexible but not mobile enabled site. Chances are, your site will look significantly less exciting on a smart phone.
Tomorrow: How to format your site for mobile viewing. http://actvra.in/8Pz
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