I wanted to recap a few valuable resources that developers can find on the web to help them start or improve their skills to produce sites for mobile devices.
My favourite, of course, is The Wireless FAQ, simply because of the time it took to bring it to a Wiki. I think it has done a big step ahead since that day and thanks to the wiki approach we have been able to add a number of resources about very important topics such as DRM, Video downloads, multimedia content delivery and more.
On the same track you might also want to check out the Techniques for the Best Practices, originally developed and maintained by the W3C. It’s another Wiki site and it’s about the Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 that the group has produced. The Wiki was chosen because the group is looking for user contributions. If you are interested you should go, read, ask questions and add content, if you feel like willing to share with the W3C community.
A more specialized site, maintained by Barbara Ballard of little spring design inc, is Mobile User Interface Design Patterns. The title says it all, Barbara is a super-expert of User Interfaces for the mobile. She has already created a lot of valuable content and while it’s less technical from a certain point of view as compared to the other two sites, it actually provides great guidance about the general UI and presentation that you should use in your mobile site. Barbara’s Wiki is certainly something to read and put in practice in your mobile sites, maybe using some techniques suggested in the other 2 sites previously named.
The last site I wanted to remind to the community is mTLD‘s developers site. The site does not have a Wiki, but rather a forum, blogs and a few selected articles, all about the mobile. The site is relatively new and the administrators are working hard to provide more and more resources every day. It is obviously a different approach, the site aims to provide all the guidance and help to develop mobile sites, also linking to external resources, of course. It’s another great place to start from and to ask questions if there’s something you can’t do or is not clear. You can reach it at dev.mobi. The site can be visited both from your desktop computer or on the move.
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