Hostels and Mobile Phones / Devices

For almost a year there has been a poll on HostelManagement.com about hostel websites and mobile phones. In the past year mobile Web use has been growing rapidly (at least in the US) and I was wondering if people have seen a change.

Over the past year have people noticed an increase in guests who are carrying smartphones (iPhone, Droid, MyTouch, HTC, Blackberry, etc.) or iPod Touch (which can browse the Web like and iPhone, but over wifi).

Has anyone started looking into making their websites mobile-friendly?

Making websites viewable on mobile devices is relatively easy from the technical side:

• Code the webpages in HTML5/CSS.
• Read about responsive web design, where you build just one website that works on just about any device.
• Use CSS for layout instead of HTML tables
• don't use Flash -- it won't load on many phones and tablet computers
• make sure the site works without JavaScript being enabled
• Have the website use separate stylesheets for regular computers vs mobile computers
• Load heavy images with CSS only on the regular website so that the site doesn't load slowly on mobile devices.

The easiest way to check if your website can be viewed on mobile devices is to find people with various models of smartphone and borrow it for a minute to check... :)