Beginner Help for Developing Web Pages for Smart Phones

Question

I have just started authoring web pages for use on "smart phones". I need to target Blackberry, WinCE, iPhone, etc. What resources or books would you recommend for someone with ample web and software development experience but no experience developing UI for these devices? What emulation kits would you recommend, and how accurately do they represent the real thing?

Edit: To clarify, I have a web application built in ASP.Net. I want a limited subset of the functionality available in the app to be available to mobile devices. I am writing a separate set of pages to accomplish this. I am starting with two, simple chunks of functionality. In the future I believe I might get requirements for more functionality to be ported.

Answer 1

Telling us the language you are using/know would be very helpful.

From an emulator standpoint, there are good ones out there, but honestly NOTHING beats having the actual device, yes it is expensive, but the user experience on a mobile device is much different than any emulator can illustrate. if you are serious about this, get a device or two for testing!

Answer 2

Documentation on developing web pages for iPhone can be found at Apple's iPhone Dev Center

You can test your site with the iPhone Simulator to get an idea of how it will look on an actual iPhone. Note: You need a Mac to run the iPhone Simulator.

If you are serious, you really need to test on actual devices.

Answer 3

Check out WURFL - the Wireless Universal Resource File

The WURFL is an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices.

The main scope of the file is to collect as much information as we can about all the existing mobile devices that access WAP pages so that developers will be able to build better applications and better services for the users

Also Checkout the Wireless FAQ