Lately, I have seen some discussion throughout the blogosphere and elsewhere on the web in regards to making your website compatible and optimized for browsing on portable devices such as PDAs and cell phones.

For a period of time, I thought this is something I should look in to doing. As webmasters we want our sites to be as accessible as possible and be able to attract viewers who are browsing from anywhere at any time. However, I have done some experimenting, and decided not to worry about it too much.

The first reason to not be too concerned about optimizing for these portable devices is a great argument against doing so. The percentage (as well as the actual number) of people who will actually browse your site from a portable device is quite small. The amount of time that you would need to spend to truly optimize for these browsers is likely not worth it for the number of visitors you will receive this way.

The second reason I decided to not worry about it is because after going to my site and the sites of some other bloggers from both my cell phone and my PDA, I discovered that mine seems to display better than some of the ones I visited. The trick seems to be to keep the amount of “stuff” you have in your header to a minimum. The more stuff that loads before your content, the farther down the screen your content is going to be.

Perhaps, sometime in the future I will work on a redirect that has a separate page for mobile devices, but for now I am fairly happy with the way my site looks on a mobile device. Also, for those of you whose pages may not load so well on a mobile device, the people who use mobile devices generally understand that websites generally do not work as good or look quite right on them.