mobile website

pjwhite99

Hi

I have a website but im in the middle of doing a mobile website with dreamweaver cs5.5 Jquery Mobile

So what i would like to know dose anyone know what width should i make my header banner and footer in photoshop?


Also what is the code i would need to put in the head to make it go to the mobile page if some1 goes to my site with an iphone?

Thanks

Eoin

So what i would like to know dose anyone know what width should i make my header banner and footer in photoshop?

You shouldn't have fixed widths, and I don't think you need the traditional head & footer images that you see on many websites. Don't have use of images for mobile sites.

Also what is the code i would need to put in the head to make it go to the mobile page if some1 goes to my site with an iphone?

Some people disagree with auto-redirecting, and some people even say there's no need for a mobile site at all, that the normal site should work on all devices. I've not seen many good examples of that.

One solution might be to use some JavaScript or Server-side script to detect if the visitor is a mobile, and provide a link at the very top of the page that allows them to choose if they want to go to the mobile version or not.

desaparecidos

Eoin wrote: »

You shouldn't have fixed widths, and I don't think you need the traditional head & footer images that you see on many websites. Don't have use of images for mobile sites.



Some people disagree with auto-redirecting, and some people even say there's no need for a mobile site at all, that the normal site should work on all devices. I've not seen many good examples of that.

One solution might be to use some JavaScript or Server-side script to detect if the visitor is a mobile, and provide a link at the very top of the page that allows them to choose if they want to go to the mobile version or not.

If you do have a separate mobile site, rather using responsive design, I'd by default redirect mobile users to that, then give them an option to go back to the desktop version.

No point in having them wait for the fully pimped desktop version to download just to get a link to the mobile version.

Eoin

Yep, or the link could be the very first element that's displayed on the page.

pjwhite99

Ok guys im still unsure on what to do how do i by default redirect mobile users to the mobile.html page i have mead?

Trojan

You can do the redirect by checking the user agent. Here's one way to do it.

But if you have only a single page for mobile users then you have bigger problems than we can help you with.

Eoin

Trojan wrote: »

But if you have only a single page for mobile users then you have bigger problems than we can help you with.

Not necessarily - it might be one file which has different 'pages' within different divs which are shown/hidden as you navigate.

Jqtouch.com has some nice examples iirc.

cormee

What ever happened to good old <link href="/css/handheld.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" />

cormee

Eoin wrote: »

it might be one file which has different 'pages' within different divs which are shown/hidden as you navigate

Not a great idea from an SEO and accessibility pov.

smash

cormee wrote: »

What ever happened to good old <link href="/css/handheld.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" />

Not all mobile devices are recognised as handheld.

Eoin

cormee wrote: »

Not a great idea from an SEO and accessibility pov.

Not sure about that, the mark-up can still be semantically laid out. The content is still there, it doesn't have to be loaded in by AJAX if it's a relatively static and small site.

cormee wrote:

What ever happened to good old <link href="/css/handheld.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" />

It never really worked. I had to make my company's intranet mobile-friendly a few years ago, but because of the aging software they used, I couldn't do a mobile specific version. Some mobiles picked up the handheld stylesheet, some didn't, some picked up both. It was very inconsistent.

Proper responsive design is great, once it's done well - but I've seen too many sites where big blocks of content are removed from the mobile version etc, meaning a lot more data is downloaded than necessary. It defeats the purpose of having the one site for all platforms.

cormee

Eoin wrote: »

cormee wrote: »

Not a great idea from an SEO and accessibility pov.

Not sure about that, the mark-up can still be semantically laid out. The content is still there, it doesn't have to be loaded in by AJAX if it's a relatively static and small site.

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You'll run into issues if you have more than 1 h1 per document, or is there a way around that?

Eoin

Not if it's a static site, no real way around it - it would either be multiple H1 tags, or H2 tags for each page/section. Neither of which are ideal (though I believe there's some guy from the Google SEO team who says that it's not that bad, if it actually suits the content - think there's a video out there).

Anyway, I'm not saying that it's best practice to do this, just that you can have a decent mobile site that's on one page. You never know, it might be a web app or intranet where SEO is not a requirement at all.

If there's a good bit of content that needs to be there for mobile users, then perhaps the one page site isn't a good idea at all.

But my personal feeling is that there are so many variables and scenarios, that a lot of what's been stated as fact is actually a bit more subjective.