Tiny sites: a guide to the mobile Web

Considering the importance of the Internet to modern life, accessing the Web using mobile phones would seem a likely and inevitable step forward for the technologically minded.

However, to date there have been some significant hurdles for online services in attracting users to get off their PCs and log onto Web sites on the move.

The biggest hurdle to date, especially in Australia, has been the expense. While most mobile carriers in Australia offer data bundles to compliment standard capped voice plans, there is still major discrepancies between the price of these bundles and the cost of using exactly the same services, offered by the same companies, but via a PC Card rather than a mobile handset. For example, at the time of writing 3 Mobile is offering 6GB of data for AU$49 a month when using a PC data card or USB dongle, and 5GB of data for AU$99 a month when using your mobile handset to receive the data.

The second major obstacle relates to the experience of the Web on a phone. In fact, before Apple released the iPhone you would have been hard pressed to find anyone who was particularly enthusiastic about accessing their favourite sites from their handset. Where the iPhone excels is with the built-in Safari browser offering a near to desktop PC experience of the Web, with the multi-touch interface improving users ability to scan over sites with ease.

Full size websites exacerbate things; they are cumbersome to view on tiny screens and existing browsers often have difficulty rendering these pages properly. In most cases data is charged by the kilobyte, too, and so viewing standard sites can end up being very expensive.

Mobile sites offer a much needed solution. Designed to be viewed on mobile devices, they are typically pared down versions of the original, removing most images and active elements like Web extensions and animations. These adjustments mean around ten to twenty times less data per page than a standard site, improving performance and lowering data cost when using a mobile device.

Best of all, the quality of mobile sites is constantly improving. Read on for a list of our favourite tiny sites.