The very day after comScore published a press release on mobile web usage, Virginia DeBolt at Think Vitamin publishes an interesting article: Make your site mobile friendly.

The mobile web is getting closer and soon enough web designers and developers will have to catch up with the limitations and possibilities of designing web sites for handheld devices. Here is a small collection of highlights from Virginia DeBolt’s article, mainly geared towards web designers and developers:

• Clean, semantic markup is crucial when you consider the variety found in mobile devices.
• Using the standard Opera browser, select View > Small Screen to see your page rendered in an approximation of what a mobile screen might display.
• Some of the phone and PDA manufacturers have emulators on their sites that you can download and use for testing
• Adobe’s Device Central, included in CS3, uses skins for dozens of mobile devices to display your content in various ways.
• For those mobiles that do understand CSS, using link is more reliable than using @import for bringing in styles.
• Eliminate floats, frames, columns, scripted effects and decorative images.
• If you have a long navigation list at the start of the page, add a skip to main content link, or move the links to the end of document flow.
• Reduce margins, paddings and borders to suit the small screen.

Link: Make your site mobile friendly (Think Vitamin)

Ever wanted a search form that looks (and behaves) just like Apple’s native search field? As you probably know, Safari uses it’s own rendering for form fields, making it extra difficult to style them if not impossible.

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Are you getting tired of clients using the deprecated <font> tag in their CMS? It’s easy enough to remove it using javascript or preferably server-side scripting, but you can also use CSS to disable the styles they define inside the font tag.

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As a web designer or developer, you probably want to incorporate a logotype into your web site at some point. So you put you put a nice, blue logo in the header on a dark background. Then suddenly your client’s client prints it and gets an ugly negative square on top. Or perhaps just uses their mobile phone to browse and get’s the same unwanted effect. This article is about placing the visual logotype into the document in it’s original form as a raw, default representative. It’s also about what role the logotype plays semantically in the document; is it a part of the design or content? Finally, I’ll tell you why using <h1> for logotype rendering is a really really bad idea.

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A List Apart invites us all to participate in a huge web design survey for developers. Random participants will win glamorous prizes such as iPods, tickets and t-shirts. Read more at ALA.

My biggest concern here is that 80% of the participants will probably be residents in North America, since most of ALA’s readers are from that region. The 1st prize (a ticket to an Event Apart in the U.S) also confirms this. It will be exciting to see the results, but I would really like to see ALA push the target audience to involve the entire planet, perhaps using translations and a more open approach in it’s questionaries.

500 responses an hour doesn’t really say much - the ALA team should be looking for a representative cross-section of their target group, and that group should be as international as possible.

From ALA:

Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?