Web Sites for Mobile Devices?

[curtiss]

Does anyone have any resources to help make a web site friendlier to mobile devices? I would like to start thinking about people visiting my sites with their PocketPC or Palm devices when I design web sites, but I really have no idea where to start.

See my blog entry for more info on why I'm asking.

[Till]

winksite maybe... They use an RSS feed to present the data in a compatible format...

[curtiss]

That's a neat little tool. I also found another one at something like mobrender.com.

While searching around, I found that Movable Type apparently has a plugin that makes it work automatically with IE Mobile as well.

I'll keep scouring the web, and will report what I find. It seems that their is some way of detecting the user agent within IE Mobile, so it should be easy to set up a special style sheet, at least, for mobile devices.

[Webnauts]

A tutorial: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/switchymclayout
A free emulator for testing: http://developer.openwave.com/dvl/
Markup validator: http://validator.w3.org/mobile/

[xENo]

There are different types of stylesheet types you can use. However, I've found it to be useless as IE4 on pocketPC ignores that and goes straight for the stylesheet intended for "screen".

Your second options is to detect the operating system by using CGI variables on the server side, and redirecting to a small-res site.

Additionally, you have the option of using WAP for cellphone site access.


In any case, semantic HTML markup is your friend. If you seperate your style and content properly, then changing your site around using just a stylesheet should be no problem and will only require minimal additional support to implement.