@jake, and re mobile browsing
"soon there'll be more people accessing the internet from mobile devices"
I've been saying this for a while, especially to people with ridiculous websites that are totally mobile-unfriendly. Two currently particularly relevant examples while we're snowed under: metoffice.gov.uk and trafficengland.com.
Typical of their breed, they are far too flashy, far too data-intensive, and all but useless on a small screen. Yet who would be their most important class of user: someone who is, or soon will be, out and about, and/or on the open road. Someone whose internet access is probably via phone, and probably via GPRS not 3G. Sorry MetOffice, your recent website "upgrade" made your weather maps on a mobile phone even worse than they were before. How hard can this be?
The map on TrafficEngland is just utterly ridiculous, verging on the unusable even on a desktop.
What kind of idiots are using taxpayers money to pay for this kind of rubbish?
But they are far from the only ones, and maybe not even the worst.
Please, can we have nice simple webpages with nice simple content up front. If you want Flash and silly scripts and such, fine, but hide it behind the front page, make it optional, don't waste the punters time, screenspace, and bandwidth. What works well and doesn't irritate users on a mobile will probably also work well and not irritate users on real screens. (El Reg sHell adverts, are you listening?)
@jake: "I will no longer be accepting contracts to work on Microsoft's products ... and I'm going to explain, in excruciating detail, exactly why to anyone who will listen."
Care to share it, either in full or just the highlights? Here or on your LinkedIn page... If you twitter/facebook/etc about it, do you think you could do a RATM v Cowell? That'd be fun.