Hi friends,
I have designed my site with a 900 x 600 fixed background image. On the computer it looks fine. How will it look on a PDA device? Will I have to design it separately for PDA?
How should check whether my site can be browsed effectively from mobile phone?
What should I do?
Well, you could always throw some detection javascript in there to check the type of browser, then redirect to a different site that is formatted for mobile devices. This seems to be the norm for most sites.
Examples:
Try using Opera's "small screen" view (View > Small Screen). This does a pretty decent job of simulating a mobile screen. Try it on Opera's own site. Note that they use a "handheld" type stylesheet that kicks-in when you're viewing on a handheld or switch to small screen mode.
You can download Google's Android SDK for free to test on.
To test on iPhone, see the iPhone Tester. There's a button on the bottom-right to rotate the iPhone into its widescreen state.
The OpenWave Phone Simluator is supposed to be good.
You can try the mobi online emulator.
The Windows Mobile 5.0 SDK for Smartphone contains "Windows Mobile 5.0 based Smartphone Device Emulator images & skin files"
Finally, some general guidance: Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices
Instead of browser detection, you can supply alternative stylesheets for handheld devices. With
<link rel="stylesheet" href="small.css" type="text/css" media="handheld">
The advantage is that you only need one version of your site, the difference lies in the stylesheets. You need one additional css, while with browser detection you would need different versions of every page in your site. The downside is that not all browsers support the media attribute for stylesheets. But the most modern browsers do, and the support for it is growing.
If you are interested, I recommend having a look at an A List Apart article.
BTW, if you are not using css yet, switch to it immediately, no matter which solution for your problem you choose. CSS rocks!
You can also get device emulators for the Blackberry range of machines.