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Old 12-21-2006, 03:29 PM
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Dubbya Dubbya is offline
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Mobile browsers have been around for several years, but their use is growing steadily. It's a niche market though, largely due to network speed, coverage and connectivity issues.

If you've designed your site with web browsers in mind and those represent the greatest number of visitors, I wouldn't bother redesigning it to accomodate every single device that may view it.

What you may wish to consider is Using a browser detect to determine the user agent connecting to the site and automatically redirect the detected device to a page that is rendered appropriately. Since blogs are primarily textual, the conversion can be a snap.

Your content need not change but the scripting for mobile browsera will. With cell phones, Blackberries, Palm OS devices, iPaqs, etc, the task of accomodating every single device is almost impossible.

You'll need to familiarize yourself with WML, WAP, and dumbed down versions of HTML and be able to render the site in a variety of screen resolutions.

You can sign up as a developer at most device manufacturer's websites and gain access to device emulators for testing purposes. You install the device, view your page to see what it looks like and take it from there.

Graphics pose another significant problem. There's no telling how the image will render or whether it will be included at all. Some devices only display a few colors or just 11 shades of gray, so you'll need to consider these issues before you even construct the page.

There is image editing software that'll help convert images but it's not an exact science. Bear in mind that most of the fancier devices still restrict your page dimensions to 180pixels by 180 pixels.

Site navigation is a huge problem to consider as well, since every device does this differently. No fancy Javascript rollovers, then there are the form submissions... Grrrr.

It's not as easy as it sounds, so if you don't honestly expect a great number of mobile visitors, just leave well enough alone.

Head over to Nokia, Palm and the RIM developer sites to download their device emulators. If you still see value in going down this road, get yourself a few books and go for it.

I'll warn you in advance, this is not for the feint of heart. Designing and building sites such as these can be extremely frustrating and the code is quite unforgiving. Pick a few mobile browsers that require very little page modification to display your site and see how it goes.

Start with the iPaq then move on to the RIM browser (for the Blackberry). Script your pages, set your browser detect up on your server and see what happens. Watch your server logs to see who's connecting. You'll know within a few weeks if it's worth adding other versions.

Good Luck.
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