How do i create a mobile site?

Question

I want to make a simple web form where somenone can access from his mobile phone. Is it ok to user plain HTML and css? What doctype should i use? I want it to be accessible from all mobile phones.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It should be fluid lay-out, XHTML 1.0 Transitional is OK. Some phones only understand WAP, some only HTML. You should use HTML, WAP is not used very much and even the iPhone does not support it. Make the files as small as possible (minify them) and use small images. Use simple navigation and take a look at other mobile sites. The best for navigation should be a list (ul). Some examples are:

• http://m.nos.nl/ (dutch, however)
• http://hyves.nl/mini (also dutch)
• http://mobile.wikipedia.org/
• last.fm on your iPod Touch/iPhone
• mobile youtube
• mobile Google

Also, make a version special for smartphones/phones with big screens (like Blackberry storm or iPhone). They have more memmory and can handle more images etc... They often come with cheap internet or internet whit a static price (e.g. $10/month for infinite internet (that month)).

Answer 2

It's pretty hard to design a site that will work for all mobile phones. For example a small of the Midwestern mobile phone carrier I know wrote a custom browser that they require be the default browser on all the phones they sell. The browser is closed source and not available for testing. It supports a bizarre subset of html, plus additional markup not in html.

There is hope though. Creating a site which is viewable from most 99.9% of mobile devices is pretty easy.

WML is a markup language designed for mobile phone browsers. Almost every mobile browser supports it. WML is not very cutting edge and the industry is moving toward XHTML.

There is an XHTML standard for mobile development. I can say much about XHTMP-MP, but I imagine it works.

What you probably want is WURFL. One can write a site in WURFL. Then when someone accesses your page, the WURLF page will be compiled into the mark up language that best matches their phone. To quote wikipedia :

WURFL solves this by allowing development of content pages using abstractions of page elements (buttons, links and textboxes for example). At run time, these are converted to the appropriate, specific markup types for each device. In addition, the developer can specify other content decisions be made at runtime based on device specific capabilities and features (which are all in the WURFL).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wurfl

Oreilly has a pretty nice but dated guide here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/02/06/mobile_browsing.html

Answer 3

If you want to have basic idea of creating mobile web site then the link below will be of great help ... i did helped me ... Link http://www.w3schools.com/dotnetmobile/default.asp

Answer 4

Perform following

1) In VS 2010 create standard ASP.NET website with pages designed for mobile best output.

2) Detect the request source, if it is in mobile than redirect user to mobile pages

3) To redirect user automatically to mobile pages use http://51degrees.codeplex.com. It is an ASP.NET open source module which detects mobile devices and provides auto redirection to mobile optimized pages when request is coming from mobile device. It makes use of WURFL mobile device database. For redirection there is no need to modify existing ASP.NET web application pages.

Apart from this it also gives upto-date mobile capability information like manufacturer, model, screen height & width, image formats supported and MANY MORE...... which helps to customize pages for best mobile output.