Blogging for Readers with Mobile Devices

Lately I've been doing a lot more of my web browsing from mobile devices such as the Treo 600 and the Sony Clie. Some blog designs work a lot better than others for mobile readers. Here are some ways to make your blog look good for mobile readers:

• Don't use frames. Mobile devices have small screens, and even though some of the browsers can display frames, it never looks good. One of the frames always seems to wind up being 20 pixels wide or tall. This is not a big issue for blogs because most do not use frames anyway.
  
• If you have a two-column layout, put your main content on the left and your navigation stuff on the right. When mobile devices display multi-column content, they display the left column first and then the right column below it. This means that if you have the navigation stuff on the left, the reader has to scroll down through all of your navigation stuff just to get to your first new post. It feels nicer to have the new post at the top. I used to have my links on the left because I liked the look of it better, but I moved it to the right once I started to do more mobile browsing.
• Pictures and tables are usually OK, because most mobile browsers can be configured to ignore pictures and table formatting if the user prefers it that way.