Web Design Tips: Mobilizing Your Site Using CSS

With a second style sheet and minor changes to a page's HTML, many online stores can offer an excellent mobile shopping experience without creating a second web page or registering a mobile specific domain.

Mobile Internet use is on the rise. And online merchants presumably want to provide customers with the best possible shopping experience. It is for these reasons that many leading ecommerce sites have begun to offer either mobile specific pages (typically a subdomain) or mobile specific styles.

In this "Web Design Tips," I am going to make some suggestions about whether you should build a separate, mobile specific website, and provide a quick example of how you might transform your CSS to create a more mobile-friendly version of your current page.
Should You Build a Separate Mobile Site?

The answer can be either yes or no. Personally, I believe that mobile Internet devices and mobile handsets will soon be as capable of rendering web pages as well as laptops and desktops do now, so that registering a .mobi domain or even building a separate site could be a waste of time.

A better solution might be to redesign your current site so that it is easy to render on multiple platforms. In fact, developing websites that easily migrate among platforms (mobile, desktop, RSS, or more) was the one of the main reasons that CSS was created. Good website design will largely separate content from layout and appearance.

If you do decide that the best way to serve mobile customers is with a mobile-specific site, I will encourage you to use a subdomain rather than a .mobi domain. For example the URL might be http://m.yoursite.com rather than http://yoursite.mobi.

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