Organize Information Effectively -- Whenever you group information using hyper-linked pages, you must maintain a balance between page depth (level of nested pages) and the length of individual pages. With handhelds, you should generally lean toward a deeper hierarchy rather than longer pages. This is primarily because it can be difficult to find your place in a lengthy section of text using the scroll bar. Try splitting long documents into pieces and creating indexes where possible. If splitting the document is undesirable, try using named anchors to mark sections and maintain links to them in a table of contents. For large or complicated data, you might choose to employ multiple indexes.

Use Supported Character Sets -- Most handhelds use the full set of Latin1 characters. International characters are not yet available as internal fonts on some devices. You can include any Latin1 character by using a code of the format "&#".

Graphic detail

Spend Time On Graphics -- Designing graphics for small, bitmapped screens is something of an art. However, once mastered, the graphics you create can make the difference between an adequate page and an outstanding one. The graphics techniques that follow mainly refer to Adobe's PhotoShop application.

Avoid Clutter -- Designing a quality layout for handhelds requires you to channel some creativity into planning for economy. If you are used to building extravagant sites with wild colors and patterns splashed across the desktop, you will undoubtedly find the small screen a frustrating environment. Try to avoid graphics that reduce readability, while providing access to useful, concise and elegantly organized information. Use graphics that fit into one screen (to avoid sometimes annoying scrolling images) and use images compatible with your display capability (e.g. 1 bit, 2 bit, full color).

Watch The Size -- When choosing images for use on devices, it's important to remember the size of the display. For example, the actual size of the PalmPilot connected organizer screen is 160x160 pixels, while Windows CE-based devices can be up to 640x480. Some software can scale images to fit inside the viewing area, but scaling reduces the quality of many images, so you generally should avoid using images wider than the handheld's viewing area. Use "large" images sparingly and only when appropriate, as they not only consume screen real estate, they consume synchronization bandwidth.

Consider The Details -- If the image is wide and somewhat complicated, the scaling operation may obscure critical information. Therefore, it's good practice to avoid large, detailed images. If there is a convenient way to convey the same information without using an image, you are probably better off dispensing with the image. If you must use detailed images, you should tailor them especially for the device in order to achieve a predictable result.

Chose Contrasting Colors -- The original color scheme of an image also plays an important role in the way it is rendered on the handheld. For example, the process AvantGo employs is to convert color images to black and white ones on images that have a high contrast ratio between colors and that have crisp edges in the details of the picture. Images that are anti-aliased, or smoothed out, do not usually convert well. It is usually a good idea to stick to graphics that are primarily black-and-white when using handhelds, as it can be hard to predict how dark certain colors will turn out, and to avoid graphics with lots of curved lines.

Design Your Own Images -- The easiest and most predictable way of deploying images on handhelds is to make your own custom bitmapped images, so that the software doesn't have to covert or resize them at all. You can create and edit such images with most image-editing packages. If you are used to working with large full-color images, it might seem rather restrictive, but it's not as limiting as you might think. It's also good practice to design your images with clean lines and simple shapes since more complicated elements tend to appear ragged. In other words, it is better to use an image that is deliberately simple, rather than to try using a complex image that looks confusing. Keep in mind what's appropriate for the medium. If you want to look at high-resolution images, save them for the desktop and reserve the handheld for less graphical information.

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