Optimising your job site for mobile devices


Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 12:44pm Friday 20 February 2009

Have you ever tested your job board/recruitment website to see how what it looks like on a mobile device?

You can test your mobile web site at dotMobi. To sum it up here are the 35 tests that the dotMobi emulator will execute against your mobile site:

Multiple device selection, File size check, Estimated cost, Estimated speed, Mime types, Character encoding, Pop up windows, Alt Text, Image maps, Specify images sizes, Measures, Page title, Use of stylesheets, Stylesheet dependency, Objects or scripts, Auto refresh, Redirection, Default Input Mode, Provide defaults, Page size limit, Large graphics, Tables, Nested tables, Tables for layout, Access Keys, Caching, External resources, Avoid free text, Structure, Google sitemap, Form submit buttons,
XHTML mobile profile, Valid markup, Second level domain, No frames.


Keep in mind that the iPhone does not currently have Flash, Java and a slew of other plugins that work in PC based browsers.

By default the iPhone turns off the scrollbars in its Safari browser until you use fingertips to slide the page down. Also having scrollbars reduces the visible area in the browser which causes issues for some apps. In Safari you can easily scroll down using the scroll wheen of your mouse. You can also turn scrollbars on using the scroll=on URL parameter.

Apple has released an iPhone Simulator as part of its iPhone Developer SDK tools. If you have a Mac and want to get serious about iPhone development I suggest you check it out.

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