Marketing & SEO Discussion List - LED Digest

Written by Tim Mullen
March 23, 2006

Hello LEDliens,

Cell phone pages are absolutely new to me for web designing.

Question One:  Where is a resource for just the basics?

Question Two:  Are there reliable PDA user / usage statistics?

Question Three: Can we brainstorm alternative design ideas?...

... such as the feasibility of a cellphone link or pda link on each page of a website to simple low graphic, text pages that are actually 'ole reliable' HTML pages... would such pages of 'repeat information' cause any search engine problems. Any other creative ideas are welcome.

Thanks LED for a very useful resourceful forum.

Tim Mullen

P.S. One friend's site I wish to experiment with is displayhq.com

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Written by Rose Lacy
March 24, 2006

Hello Tim Mullen and others interested in the mobile web,

I got my information from a bunch of different sources, mainly http://www.w3schools.com/wap, wapforum.org, and http://www.w3.org/Mobile/. A free developer kit is available from Nokia.

"Are there reliable PDA user / usage statistics?"

Not sure, but is seeing everyone you know with a PDA or web cell phone reliable enough?

"Can we brainstorm alternative design ideas?..."

Clean HTML will display on most new phones. Last year's Nokias and T616s will only display WML. WML is easy to learn. The short way is to replace all your <p> tags with <card> and add links to the next <card>. The head tags are different, and you'll have to set a RewriteCond in your .htaccess to redirect to your wml page.

"P.S. One friend's site I wish to experiment with is displayhq.com"

If it's understandable without a style sheet or graphics, then it might be okay. Long pages will have slow load times.

Rose Lacy

webrosedesign.com

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Written by Kerry Davis
March 24, 2006

You can find several HTML books that have sections on mobile HTML programming.  I've got one by Elizabeth Castro called "HTML for the World Wide Web," 5th edition.  It has a decent chapter on the basics of programming for mobile devices.

Thank you,

Kerry Davis, Processing & Printing Manager

olydata.net

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Written by Valerie Beeby
March 25, 2006

"You can find several HTML books that have sections on mobile HTML programming." - Kerry Davis

By the time a book has made it into print about programming for mobiles, it's probably out of date, at least for most new phones. Even web pages - particularly if they've been hanging around waiting for Google to show them - can be several months old. Admittedly so are most phones - often locked in a time plan. Still, it's as well to keep up.

I've been doing some research into writing for phones as my site is about making tiny graphics suitable for mobile screens. Adobe GoLive (no relation) has excellent facilities for creating mobile content. GoLive CS2 offers interactive simulators which they update for the latest handsets so you can see what you're creating.

The preferred language for mobiles is XHTML or XHTML Mobile - stricter versions of HTML but not that different. WML for WAP sites is more individual, but simple. WML pages are 'cards' which are subsets of 'decks'.

All is not lost, however. Mobile browsers like Opera reformat HTML and can show 'ordinary' web pages. The Opera people have some useful tips on making pages compatible at http://my.opera.com/community/dev/device/

Adobe recommend using CSS.

"If you’re designing pages for mobile devices, designing with (CSS) liquid layouts is a good way to ensure that your layout resizes to accommodate small screens."

Good luck!

Valerie Beeby

purple-owl.com