Best Practices for Information Sites

Following are some important points you should think about as you design your information site:

Information sites are perfect for offline browsing

Avoid everything that is not supported offline, such as form fields, large bitmaps, or excessive advertisements. Many news sites or information sites ask for short feedback on a given article. Because this feedback requires a post back to the server, an offline viewer does not get the same experience. You can add a mailto link on the page because the Windows Mobile software for Pocket PCs supports sending e-mail messages offline.
Concentrate on the essential content

Do not show any links that Internet Explorer Mobile users are not likely to view anyway, such as large picture slide shows.
Use introductory pages over continuously linked pages

Many news and information sites create short pages of the articles and point to the continuations with "Click here to read more..." links at the bottoms of the pages. This practice is not very useful for Internet Explorer Mobile in an offline scenario. Most users do not change their link depth in Mobile Favorites very often. It is better to create short introductory pages that contain links to all the pages of articles. These pages still require users to change to a link depth of one but make it more obvious that they must do so. You can even add hints on the introductory pages, telling users what link depth they should enter in their synchronization options.

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