Building a mobile web site

Question

We are in the process of looking at allowing mobile devices to view our site. We have targeted 3 phones - BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.

Being new to all this I have several questions.

I am going to assume that what we are really looking at here is the browser capabilities of the devices and not so much the device itself (the device comes into play if we are building a mobile application - correct?)

So, We have an on line auction site in which the front end is build using JSF 1.1, myFaces and RichFaces. We are going to move to JSF 1.2 anyway and this will allow us to make use of Trinidad since it appears to be friendly to a mobile site.

The concern I have is performance. On our current site we allow the user to do a search and the result of that search can be a lot of data returned. Running from a desktop browser there is a wait for result set now. I can only assume that there will be a greater wait for the result set when viewing from a mobile device unless we do something different for these request - is that correct?

So just building a mobile front end is still not going to address any performance issues that we face with the non mobile site - is that correct statement?

Are there any sites out there that are recommended to learn more about how to take a site and make it mobile ready?

Thanks

Answer 1

You could start from http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/ if you are a web designer/developer you already know everything to design for mobile devices. you just need some info about browser capabilities of your target devices and for that you can have a look at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/wmlprogramming . For basics of web development for iPhone (also for Android ) http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/ch01.html is a good start