Place <meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true"> tags on the top of every page.

Avoid tables that go over 150 pixels wide for Palm and Microsoft Smartphone, or 213 for Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003.

Users really dislike having to scroll horizontally within an M-Business channel. This most often happens if you accidentally represent a table using pixel width values instead of percentage width values.

There's no need to place your entire content in a 150-pixel table.

This is a common mistake that I often see—sites publish all their news stories inside a 150-pixel table. There's no reason to do this—just use normal text. M-Business Client will word-wrap your text for the appropriate screen size. (Plus, if you put all your text into a 150-pixel table, it will look rather odd on a Windows Mobile Pocket PC 2003, or larger screen device.)

Don't create your entire content with <font size="-2">.

This is also a common mistake—people feel that if they're creating something for a small screen, they should be using a font that fits many characters within 150 pixels. This isn't necessary, because the default font is already quite small for these mobile devices.

Because the Palm OS doesn't support small fonts, using a <font size=-2> tag will look perfectly normal when you're testing your page on Palm. But Microsoft OS devices, and the newer Palm OS 5 devices, support many more fonts, including <font size=-2>, meaning that your font will be smaller than you probably intended.

Adjust your logo so it looks good on mobile devices.

Usually this involves converting your image to a 216-color Web-safe palette. For more information, see Designing graphics for channel pages.

Preview your page on all device types that your company supports.

For Microsoft OS devices, you can also preview your page in Internet Explorer, sizing its window to the approximate size of the target device. Ask yourself: Do you have any text that looks strangely shifted to the left? Expecting to see a page break after a logo? Those formatting glitches will show up on Microsoft OS devices as well.

Do not place results in the Forms Manager. Instead, use cookies to link to search results on the front page.

Remember the first rule about using the Forms Manager: Don't use the Forms Manager. Nobody knows about it. Even when users do know about it, most of them don't like using it. Use cookies to remember the user's last few search results and place links to them directly on the front page. For more information, see Submitting forms the right way.

Replace any Submit buttons with SubmitNoResponse buttons.

This gives you the opportunity to customize the dialogue box that appears, and you don't have to clutter the Forms Manager with unneeded forms. For more information, see Using submitNoResponse() with the Submit button.

Set up static stories to cache for at least 1 hour.

Personally, I recommend 2 hours or more.

Set up images to cache for 24 hours or more.

This will probably be your biggest savings, as images are usually the largest chunks of data you're transmitting. Plus, you can safely cache them for longer periods of time.

Set up personalized pages to be Cache-Control: Private .

For more information, see Caching guidelines.