I start to review a new website (not a big fancy one) and the customer asked me to include a mobile version.
My questions are:
Do you program for the mobile site different code as the main site or is just the same? For instance I checked NFL.COM and has a very different, but what is the standard?
Do you char separately for this mobile version (I guess yes). If so, how? a percentage? or what?
first thing to find out is what mobiles they expect to target. If it is iphone, android or other recent compliant mobile browsers then you could use css3 media queries and use a different stylesheet to target those browsers. This has lots of pro’s and con’s but is the easiest way to do a mobile site.
This really helps and I looking at that right now.
My question was also related to content. I mean, in a telephone a complete web site is kind of hard to look, so do I have to make a mobile.domain with some of the content instead of all of it?
this is up to you. Many argue that you should deliver content to the context i.e. if someone is on their mobile then they will want a different experience and possibly different content.
Examples could be local bus company web sites, your mobile experience could include bus times, bus routes as a priority and possibly some gps or location based pages that could show you bus stops.
On a desktop you may want the full site with about us, et etc that the mobile user may not want
Others argue that you supply the same content to both devices to give the user a unified experience.
Personally I think it depends on the site. If it is a blog then you could realistically supply same content. If it is a more in depth or large site then there is an argument that people will not browse around the same on mobiles so you could adapt content.
If you need a seperate domain also is up to you and how you build the site.
Good practise is if you are doing different site would be check browser > inform user going to mobile site and ask if they want mobile or desktop > take user to choice of site > store cookie for future visits.
Really is a huge topic and you can waste a lot of time on it.
How you building the site? Content management system or static site?
You found out what phones they want to support? Not enough to say I want a mobile site really. There needs to be some discussion on what to support. If its your first site then look at Mobile Graded Browser Support | jQuery Mobile and see how the browsers compare. Your A grade browsers are very good nowadays.
Keep your pages small.
Navigation should be clear and concise.
Avoid graphics that do nothing to add to the navigation or readability
Test your pages Be sure to test your pages in both smartphones like the iPhone and less sophisticated mobile devices like PDAs.