Mobile-friendly site

**Mpaige** · 29 November 2010, 02:06 PM

Hi all!

I have been tooling around with create mobile friendly sites and have seen a thread or two here about it. There's some good stuff there but my question is sort of different.

I have set up a subdomain on my server for mobile.mysite.com. I plan to trial (and then purchase) the auto detect script mentioned in another thread here (detectmobilebrowsers.mobi).

BUT how do I create a site that displays properly in the mobile phone without using one of the hosted solutions? Or is that not possible?

I created (for example) a 480x320 iphone-sized version of my index page in WD6 but when you look at it on the iphone it's still small. I realize that I'll need to install the auto-detect but before I go through that, I'd like to figure out whether or not I can create a webpage that will display properly in a mobile browser. I'm thinking I might need to do it in straight HTML format (using dreamweaver instead of WD?)? Or ....I'm interested in hears others' thoughts on it and experiences with this.

It almost seems like I'll end up having to use a hosted service????

FWIW, there's not a lot that will be changing on any of these sites, so constant maintenance of new content is not really an issue.

Thanks!

**gwpriester** · 29 November 2010, 05:40 PM

I cannot answer your first question but do consider that most mobile devices that can display web content have higher resolution than a web browser so may be able to display a small page with more detail. The iPad for example has 132 ppi screen resolution which is incredible sharp.

**mikecharnock** · 29 November 2010, 07:26 PM

Try putting

Code:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width” />

in the <HEAD>

--Mike

**gwpriester** · 29 November 2010, 08:27 PM

Welcome to TalkGraphics Mike

So, MPage would need to add a placeholder to his pages, name the placeholder <HEAD> amd insert the snippet of text in the Web Properties > Placeholder > Replace with HTML Code text entry box?

**Mpaige** · 29 November 2010, 08:33 PM

thanks Mike! I'll give it a go.

@gary
Yup. Usually I just create the HTML for the placeholder inside an HTML editor then drop the whole thing in the placeholder. But thanks for putting this in case someone reading this thread is scratching their head about it.

**Mpaige** · 01 December 2010, 04:13 PM

Yep! Worked like a charm for the mobile page. Now I just need to detect mobile browsers and redirect automatically to this page.

I think I'lltinker around with some of the coding that I saw at detectmobilebrowsers.mobi. The code is free to non commercial sites, which at least gives me the chance to test it before buying it for my commercial sites. I'll update.

**Mpaige** · 01 December 2010, 04:45 PM

Well I'm in the weeds now.

The idea is to get the code to detect whether a person in on a mobile browser and automatically redirect them to the mobile page/site, which, using the code Mike mentioned, detects the page size and creates a display that fills the page. That part works. Its now the auto detect that is troubling me. The code I downloaded from detectmobilebrowesers.mobi seems simple enough, especially when you use their function builder.

require_once('mobile_device_detect.php');
mobile_device_detect(true,true,true,true,true,true ,true,'http://oasismediaproductions.com/iphone_index.htm',false);

(the true, true parameters are various types of mobile browsers you can set it to detect and redirect (true) or not (false)).

Anyway the code is in PHP so I went to this thread, which was the original one I learned about the code from to see how others dealt with the PHP issue

http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthre...+detect+mobile

The last comment seems to indicate some success but when I tried it it doesn't work at all.

Does anyone have any ideas how I might get my index page to upload as .php WITH the PHP code above in a placeholder? When I tried to upload it as PHP it was php.htm and so were the _files. ARRGH. I even tried uploading it using an FTP program instead of the WD6 publish. It uploads the same, of course, but will not allow me to rename the files on the server if the extension ends in htm.

Any ideas?

**haakoo** · 01 December 2010, 06:50 PM

free http://www.pcmechanix.ca/mobile_redirect.htm

Hans

**Mpaige** · 01 December 2010, 07:54 PM

Thanks. This looks like a decent free alternative. The other one is only free to non-commercial sites.

I think I know why my last attempt didn't work. I didn't include the opening php tag. Duh. But mostly that's because the coder has so much GUNK between the opening and closing tags I didnt copy it all from the download file. Ick.

Anyway, this is a nice script, it seems. I will take a look at it and compare it to the other. I think the big issue for me is how to create and upload a PHP page from within WD6. Still not sure its possible but I can use dreamweaver and an FTP program if i have to. Just want to see if it can be done from within Xara first.