How do you make your website viewable on someone's cellphone?

I just thought of this the other day when my friend tried to see my site on her phone, but all it showed was my logo and nothing else.

I think I remember reading somewhere it had something to do with maing them .xtml pages or something like that. How is this done?

Well, until there is anything resembling a standard on cell-phones, no one I know is going to be optimizing for them. The very limited testing I've done on a couple of more advanced phones, shows ok CSS support, but no floating, or inline display. By displaying everything linearly, the chances of messing things up is very limited.

The best mobile sites check the browser string to see if you are on a mobile browser, and redirect you to a simplified version of the site specifically for mobile devices. Take all the fluff out of the page and just have the basic functionality and it will look good. You can even get a .mobi version of your domain if you want, probably.

However, I agree that the mobile community is still underdeveloped and it might be a tad soon to start working on something that will affect such a small % of your users. Depends on the site I guess as to how useful it would be on a mobile device like a phone.

The best and only way to create a site for use with mobile phones is to create its own stylesheet. In the style sheet make sure you set a display:none; on div tags that contain layout graphics. Just allow your logo, content and links to be shown and make sure you set the stylesheet media to "mobile". After that its all kinda trial and error until it looks good on your mobile device; and keep in mind, like it was already mentioned before, there is no set mobile guidelines so what looks good on your mobile device may not look as great on someone elses. But at least with the CSS you can make it work decent enough on any mobile device.

http://mobilewebbook.com/

If you write standards compliant code your site should work on mobile devices. It probably won't look quite like you expect and it might vary some from site to site, but coding to the standards helps a lot.

This is going to be the next frontier right here.

When do you think that creating sites which you are able to view on mobiles will become a standard? soon? I have a fairly large personal project that I am taking on and would like to be aware of what people think?


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I don't think site on the mobile phon will really take off until the phone companies make those sites as accessible to us on the web as they are on our phone.

But: it sure is something to think about.