Avoid clutter
Designing a quality layout for Palm devices 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, etc).

[We strongly recommend you use an absolute minimum of graphics, both to reduce download time and increase readership. -- DG]

Minimize page length
Palm computers restrict the amount of screen space available to an application, so, when developing applications for small screens, keep in mind that horizontal/vertical scrolling is not always the best solution. Instead, consider providing quick drill down navigation via hypertext links that easily and intuitively allow you to navigate forward and backward.

Organize information effectively
When 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 Palm devices, 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.

Test your application
Do not assume your applications will be perfect because they look good on a Web site viewed through a desktop PC browser. Test them with an actual handheld device. You can also preview Palm pages using 3Com's Palm OS Emulator (located at http://www.palm.com/devzone/pose/seed.html).

Use supported HTML tags
Using supported and industry standard HTML tags will enable your Web-based application to transfer more elegantly onto a handheld device. When using HTML tables be cautious to not create overly large or complex nested tables. Tables can quickly consume screen space, require both vertical and horizontal scrolling, and unnecessarily effect display performance during table rendering.

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 "&#<num>".

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.