How to make Mobile version of website

Question

I am looking for something that will help me learn how to set up my site so that when people go to it there is the regular version and the mobile version. Problem I am having is that most of the sites I see on google are pay sites that help you set that up. Can I just make two versions of my site and load them both on my hosting? Also how does it know when to load the mobile versus the regular? These are the types of things I am looking to learn, any suggestions of places to start?

Answer 1

Please please please make sure you do the following:

1. Only do a mobile version if it adds value.
2. If a user requests a deep link from a mobile device, don't redirect to the mobile home page
3. Allow the user to choose to view the full version
4. Make sure tablets such as the iPad uses the full version by default
5. Don't serve WML to the hi-res smartphones such as the iPhone
6. If your full sized website is unusable on a phone, consider tweaking it to be more suitable (don't print content text too wide).

Modern iPhones and iPads are perfectly capable of handling most full sized websites, there is little need for a mobile version unless it actually improves the user experience. I hate to get redirected to a baby interface that doesn't provide the information I need.

Good examples of mobile versions include:

• Google website
• Gmail website

Mediocre examples include:

• Any blogpress site

Bad examples include

• anything that uses WML

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Here's Apple's advice on providing mobile versions to the iPad:

Note that the Safari on iPad user agent string contains the word "Mobile", but does not contain the word "iPhone". If you are currently serving mobile content to any browser that self-identifies as "Mobile", you should modify your user agent string checks to look for iPad and avoid sending it the wrong version of your site. The version numbers in this string are subject to change over time as new versions of Safari on iPad become available, so any code that checks the user agent string should not rely on version numbers.