How do you build a version of your website for mobile phones?

What is the best way to build a mobile version of your website?

Also, do I need to put some type of coding in to determine when to serve the mobile version and non-mobile version?

I am just trying to gain information on the whole mobile website deal because most of the website i run look like crap in a mobile version.

Thanks for the help.

 

Very interesting question. None of my websites are specially coded for phones, but they all look good on my HP I-Paq phone

Cheers,

Venetsian.

 

I just know it is going to very important in the near future to have a very user friendly mobile version website.

Everyday more and more people are using the internet on their mobile phone.

 

I started working on this a couple of years ago and never progressed past the initial stages. You can create a PDA friendly version of your site and automatically redirect that type of visitor by including the following in your head statement. In this example I planned to place the "friendly pages" in a directory named pda.

I actually tested this with my own pda using a local hotspot and it did work. You can also browse that directory in your browser using yourdomain.com/pda. You have to make really small pages. They look silly on a regular monitor.

I don't mind sharing the actual url via pm. I just don't want to post it here since I never finished the project.

 

I thought there might be another way then javascript to determine which version of the website to serve?

Thanks for the input!

 

and this detects it on PHP

if ( ($s = strpos(strtoupper($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), $parent)) !== FALSE )
  {            
    $f = $s + strlen($parent);
    $version = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], $f, 5);
    $version = preg_replace('/[^0-9,.]/','',$version);
              
    $info[browser] = srtolower($parent);
    $info[version] = $version;
    break; // first match wins
  }
if($info[browser]=="windows ce") {
  //this is windows mobile CE
}

PHP:

Ok that's the detection but does anyone know some specific design features that should suport that ?

Cheers,

Venetsian

 

i think if you make your site XHTML validated, that will server the purpose in most cases.

 

you need to design your pages taking into consideration the screen size of PDA (far smaller then our monitors), your font size, buttons, links and image sizes almost everything.

Best way is to design and test with different PDA's you have access to.

just my 2 cents.