Best Mobile Web Practices?

[ndwest12]

Hoping this is a better place to ask this, already was "scolded" on stackoverflow as this an "opinion" piece and not a general question.

I'm trying to narrow down a method of building mobile websites to use as a norm. My latest site I used jQuery mobile, which is now in a stable release out of alpha and beta. I was extremely impressed with it. I had used it in beta and there were noticable quirks, namely with the fixed position footer, stuttering transitions, these have been all fixed with the stable release. However, I wanted to see the general opinion from a community of peers.

Searching the web gives me plenty of articles all written in 2010-2011 and as this is a constant rapid changing area of development I wanted to see the other areas I can toy around and study.

Thank you in advance.

[Custard7A]

This will probably get moved to the sub-section for mobile development in specific, but it seems like a fine question. I don't know anything myself, besides the seemingly obvious lightweight approach, and smaller-screen optimization, but I expect I'll reach a point soon where I'll be wanting to look into this myself.

Actually, I didn't know Javascript was all that safe (usability-wise) in mobile browsers, you seem to suggest otherwise.

[VIPStephan]

I haven’t really had the need to develop mobile websites yet but I also can’t quite imagine what kind of advanced user experience/interaction features you would want to put on a website in a tiny screen. I mean, as far as I recall, most smart phones already have some kind of sticky footer from their own user interface, and there is not much space for advanced animation kinds of things.

I’m sure that there will likely be websites that are primarily used on mobile devices but then the old principle from the first days of the internet apply today even more: The user comes for information, not for advanced shiny effects. A simple website that provides the info the user comes for is much better than a website interfused with bloated boilerplate and framework code that believes to have an answer for everything.

But I’m one of the critical companions of invention and there may be things I just find so useless that I can’t imagine they would be done, even though other people actually can and will do them.

[StevenHu]

One of the most important things to think about is responsive web design (RWD), that is, making the web site work across multiple screen sizes and resolutions and not on a fixed size, like for the iPhone. If you type "responsive web design" in Google, you'll get a lot of hits on the subject. Mobile use of websites is really exploding, and learning about RWD is a must.