Wednesday, 20th August 2008

making mobile sites

With the growing market in mobile/handheld devises it seems to be getting more important then ever to make your sites mobile friendly.

I first got interested after reading this: http://healyourchurchwebsite.com/2008/06/23/if-the-olympics-are-going-mobile-then-why-not-your-church-website/

As part of the re-vamp of whychristmas?com, I’ve just got a mobile version  going using ‘mowser‘.  I’d looked at a few options and mowser seems really nice.  mowser is a site/browser for ‘handheld’ devices and can turn any existing site into a more handheld/mobile friendly one. (just enter a url and hit go)

So the mobile version of whychristmas?com would be at: http://mowser.com/web/www.whychristmas.com

However, to make it easier for handheld browsers to find it, you can add a simple line in the <head> section like:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”text/html” media=”handheld” href=”http://m.whychristmas.com/” title=”Mobile/PDA Version” />

And tada, a mobile friendly site!!!

You’ll see that in the line above, the url is to: http://m.whychristmas.com to be posh(!), I’ve set-up a sub domain in cpanel (m) and set it to redirect to the mowser address.  Doing that means the ‘mobile version’ link in the footer of the site looks like it’s coming from the main whyc site, so a bit nicer…

And if you use wordpress, there’s this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mowser-wordpress-mobile/ which does all the work for you!

I’ve used the wp plugin on the whychristmas blog and my church site (as it’s run in wp…) and of course this blog!!! and I think it will be one of the ‘must install’ plugins on a wp site.

With the boom in handhelds/smartphones, etc. this seems to be a really quick (and easy) way of making sure sites are good on them as well!

by james in Tech, Work, html & css | permalink

2 Responses to “making mobile sites”
  1. Mayank Says:

    hey can u tell me how to make website that can open through mobiles E.G from nokia 6610

  2. james Says:

    Mayank, I’ve put a follow up post at: http://blog.jpc-design.com/tech/more-on-mobile-sites/

    which might help you.

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