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3. Don’t Build for Just One Device

It’s really tempting to build the site for just the iPhone: you can use modern CSS (including things CSS3 selectors and transformations), you don’t have to hack around annoying browser quirks, and testing is extremely easy. But any single device, even one as ubiquitous as the iPhone, has a limited share of the mobile market, especially internationally. Rarely can you justify the cost of creating a one-off site for a very small number of your users.

4. Optimize Everything

The browsers on mobile devices operate under much stricter constraints than their desktop cousins. Slower CPUs, smaller amounts of memory, and smaller hard drives mean that less data can be cached. On the iPhone, for instance, only files smaller than 25 KB are cached. This puts very specific limits of the size of your files. For a large site like Flickr, 25 KB worth of JavaScript and CSS barely scratches the surface. To put our files under the limit, we ran everything through the YUI Compressor using the most aggressive settings. We ran all images through compression tools as well (we like pngout and Smushit), reducing each image file by an average of 40%. We also made heavy use of sprites, where possible.