Need design help for web enabled cell phone use?

I have a website that has been active since 2002. I was approached the other day by a person that said they tried accessing the site via cell phone.

They stated it didn't display.

Do I need to code the site differently?
Is there a way to re-direct do different pages depend on cell phone usage?

Thanks for any advice.

 

Can you have like a page where it is multi cell phone friendly and from their ask them directly what phone they are from?

 

Yes, I suppose I could. I have never developed for a cell phone. What do I have to do differently?

 

What you should do is use XHTML BASIC for that specific page, but if you can't have 2 diferent pages, one for the mobiles and one for computers, use valid HTML and do not use inline styles, but external CSS files.

Is really difficult to have a CSS file that will work for the whole range of mobile devices, but at least you can have NO css file. That way they can at least view the web via a mobile device.

Just to end, you should have mobile devices in mind when marking up your site, so they do not have to scroll down 30 times to see the real content. If you can't put the content at the top, use "skip to content" anchors links to make it easy.

 

you can have wap version of your site. If your site is too heavy it won't get displayed even on high end smartphones.

 

How do you do a WAP site?

 

Friends with web enabled phones tell me the small screen rendering (scr) mode in Firefox's web developer extension and in Opera are close approximations to their phone screen renderings.

That doesn't mean the next phone/pda won't mangle it.

I also notice that backgrounds are treated differently in the different browser's scr. So be wary of combos of color and background-color. What may work in the normal screen may leave you with invisible text in scr and maybe in the phone.

Another weird thing from Opera, which is all too common, is the Opera 7 seems to work better than Opera 8 in scr.

cheers,

gary

 

For those wap devices that need wml (wireless markup language), especially as compiled to binary, there is html2wml, a PERL script that can be used from the cli to produce a static page, or as a cgi for on-the-fly conversion.

hth,

gary

 

You can't go wrong with templates, such good value for money. Don't worry about somebody else having the same template, have you ever come across a decent site that has the same template as another?

Just make sure your not using the same one as a competitor.

 

i hve difficulties finding your web site
hence precise help impossible

2 years ago i surfed my own site extensibly using a nokia 3650 with zero problems on all normal pages
but
all pages are valid html4.01 with valid CSS1 or CSS2
that also was the standard the nokia OS handles

here again it pays off to have fully validated code on each page/entire site
then all modern cellphones can handle the pages
even my regular e-cards with all the forms worked perfect in SCR of that time back

a brief review of cellphone manufacturors or other data to see what phones support what level of validated code might help you
common is a full support for html4.01 and some even support xhtml 1 or 1.1
and also CSS 1/CSS2 is normally fully supported
at lest with the global leader nokia

nokia offers a whole buch of support for webdesigners offering content for mobiles - also SW to simulate mobiles is on the free open source market to simulate the surfing of a site by particular cp models

zFeeder also offers WAP format RSS feed format - in Feb i had some 4517 visitors just on WAP RSS feed

hence it may well be worth to invest some time to fully study mobile presentation of a site if content is attractive to mobile users

all those coming from G search are served by Googles WAP proxy which converts all pages to simple WAP format even for older mobiles needing wml format

final point
if you publish your URL i have a look at the code of pages to see what exactly may needed to change for modern mobile use ( NOT for old use on wml format mobiles - that is history in most mobiles nowadays )

here you can find a small vallidated file in WAP format to see how wap pages can look like
http://www.kriyayoga.com/wap.xhtml
there are also OTHER validated formats - such as WML - this one is for modern units.

 

what are some good cell friendly templates?