Hi Jon,
No worries about not replying immediately - you made up for it with the usefulness of the reply :)
I'd say the most important part of mobile design is thinking about mobile from the start. It encourages you to identify what the key pieces of functionality that your website simply must surface are and helps you build beautiful interfaces.
Wise words, I'm sure. While I'm not particularly interested in mobile computing, it forcing me to think about deeper about key functionality and flow for the design can only be a good thing.
Without a doubt going forward you will find media queries useful: http://css-tricks.com/css-media-queries/
Thanks for the links. I always thought of using css media queries as cheating somehow, but I suppose it makes sense to create actually attractive and useful designs which can scale down elegantly.
I shall read up more on this stuff, and at the very least try hard to make sure everything is basically usable. Long shot, but if anybody wants to dive in to help, please do! https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skin:Erudite
As for simulating a mobile device, thanks for the advice. I'm running Debian Squeeze at the moment, so I'll have to update my Chromium to get the developer tools with exciting device metrics options - thanks for pointing that out.
There are various simulators you can download so that you can test on iphone, android devices as well as various mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile and Opera Mini that you can test out!
What advantage would the 'various simulators' you mentioned have over just using Chrome's metrics stuff? I just wonder whether it's worth me setting that stuff up too?
Thanks again, very much, for you help.
Nick