Question about getting our company website to work properly on Cellphone/mobile devices.

I recently over took a graphic design position that also entails "taking over the webmaster seat." (Aka, I didn't know I was to be the webmaster, but looky me, here I am). While I have experience in web design and site management, I am completely self taught, and have only freelanced, and not worked in a corporate environment with it.


Anyways, the guy before me had recently "overhauled" the entire website. For code and back end scripting (sorry if I am using these terms where I shouldn't) ie. Login, is concerned, we do have a CF developer.
The guy who re-created the website (then left) created dreamweaver templates for each area of the site. For some reason, if I try to access the site through my boss' blackberry, it hangs in loading, and never loads (well, I only waited about 20 mins, you never know . We are a pretty big company and have several other sites, so I checked them as well, and they load fine. As all the sites use CF, HTML, and CSS, the only difference I see in why the site might not work on the blackberry (and other devices we've tried) is because of the templates.

So, does anyone know if my theory is correct, and/or if there is something we can do about this? My CEO has now appointed this as my job to fix this.

How "heavy" are the pages in terms of file size and http calls? If you're mobile network connection speeds are sometimes dire so intensive pages will take ages to load or just time out.

For the mobile web the key is often to simplfy. Strip out graphics and any content that's not needed for the visitor to complete their tasks.

I was just reading another article that refered to the HTTP calls, but I am not exactly sure how to tell what that is (this is where my lack of formal training comes in). There are not too many images on the site. Actually one background img/header and one background navigation img and then some required ads. Largest one is under 92kbs. (http://www.mra-net.org).

There is a bit of Javascript running at the top of the page, which is my next area to tackle to see if it makes a difference.

Ok we tested a few different things and found it was hanging up on a bad css file. Although now we are having trouble with other pages. This is only happening on the blackberry curve--all newer versions of the blackberry seem to be working fine. Thanks.

In simple terms the html page, every image and every css/javascript file you load is a call, or "request". For instance on your home page I saw 5 CSS files - that makes 5 requests - combining the CSS into one file will help.

A 90kb image on a mobile device can take ages to load (think minutes), depending on your network. I'd say for a mobile site you don't need that header image, a 5kb logo is all you often need.

Great! Thanks for the clarification. Our CF coder thought it was something else.I believe we are going to add in a Mobile CSS file which will hopefully clear up the issues. Thanks again for your time.

Yep, agree with this advice. This sounds to me like something that should be advertised on the back cover of a comic book. If you're not getting a good feeling about the boss, it's time to leave.