I have a friend who joking says, ‘I don’t care if I sound good, but do I look good?’ So I’m asking you, does your blog look good?

I know I look good in my street clothes. I have nice clothes, and I even have what some would call –fashionable clothes. I’m sure you ladies out there just exploded. I have what most men would call casual wear too. I look good in it all. However, I don’t look good in spandex or hammer pants. You know why? Outside of the fact they’re grossly out of style, they make me look awkward. I wear both what’s in style and what looks good on me.

So What?
I’m getting there. You should care what your blog looks like in many different browsers. Why? Well, because you likely have many different types of visitors. You’ll have those who love IE, those who smother their lips all over Firefox, and even those who read from the Opera (what?). Your blog should look good in all those browsers. No one likes a blog in spandex or hammer pants. It just ruins your brand and the likelihood of getting subscribers.

Mobile Devices
I have been a little late to the game on cellular web browsing. I admit I don’t own an iPhone. I’m not that obsessed with the Internet (Ok, I am, but I’m attached to Verizon). I do own an Amazon Kindle, though. And my Kindle surfs the web quite nicely via Sprint’s EVDO network. The best part about that? It’s free! I don’t pay a dime to surf online while scooting along at 70 mph on the interstate.

So that’s exactly what I did this past weekend. I took a road trip to Michigan, along the way I bounced from site to site. It was a good way to pass the four hour travel time. I only looked at blogs that held my attention, and that had easy to access archives. While the Kindle moved quickly amongst pages, the typing interface and hyperlink clicking became a little cumbersome. I noticed a few things along the way and thought I would share them with you.

A Blog’s Mobile Appearance
The shades of grey don’t do justice to my logo, but other elements stood out from more popular blogs. The header of my site doesn’t contain a lot of spam. Some sites, like John Cow.com have several Kindle pages worth of affiliate links, ads, and fat to flip through before finding meat. Bloggers should be aware that large headers can dispell mobile readers, but who cares?

Well, you should care. Mobile technology seems to be taking shape quite nicely. With a strong push by Google to bring wifi nationwide, we might see an explosion of internet browsing devices that fit in our hands. We should at least know how our site gets viewed in various mobile browsers. On my trip northward, I tried to read ProBlogger.net without any success. I received a 404 error. I think it had something to do with their caching system. So it pays to know whether your site delivers in mobile format.

How to Tell if Your Blog Looks Fat
I’ve known for a while about browsershots.org, which gives users a view of their site from many different browsers. We’re talking about in the fifty range, people. That’s a lot of testing on standard browsers.

I’m not an expert at mobile browsers, but this guy seems to know a thing or two about the iPhone and CSS, so I would ask him how to take down your site’s lovehandles. .

Can you emulate the mobile platform? You can find various emulators to see how your blog looks to the on-the-go user. Let’s take a look at a few.

Palm OS emulator [view site]
From what I read, this site only requires you to create a login, then you can download their emulator for free to your desktop. Use at your own risk, though. I don’t know anything other than what I’ve read.

iPhoney [view site]
Mac users rejoice! The only iPhone browser emulator I could find comes strictly for macintosh systems. I did find a site that offered online screenshots of your site, but they charge five euros, and with the current dollar exchange rate I’m pretty sure I would be broke if I paid that amount. There’s some requirements for using the iPhoney, outside of having to own a Mac, like having OS X on there. Just go check it out if you’re interested. It’s open source, so you can’t go wrong with the price.

.NET Solutions [view site]
Microsoft uses the mobile OS, which runs on .NET frameworks. If you know enough about that kind of thing, then you can look at this guy’s list to see how to emulate certain types of phones.

If you learned one thing from this post…don’t let your friend’s blog wear spandex. No one should be caught dead in that get-up.

UPDATE: While I was surfing this afternoon, I found a wildly good plugin for those wanting to optimize their sites for the iPhone. It’s a plugin from Content Robot. Check it out.

If you know of any good mobile browser emulators, just drop a comment and I’ll update this post.