[Web4lib] mobile websites

[Jessica Woolman]

Robin
Last summer I attended Open Web Vancouver 2009, where there was a great
speaker on mobifying your website, you may be able to find the slides or
some other information.
In a nut shell, you create a copy of the main pages of your website, and
modify the design/css/template etc., so that it is friendly to a mobile
phone. This is a duplicate of your website, usually stored at a variation of
your website name (ie.. Www.yoursite.com becomes www.m.yoursite.com)
Then, you can either route users there from the home page by putting a
"mobile friendly" button, or you can build in a program that detects mobile
users coming to the site, and automatically route them to the mobile
version. 
For pages on the website such as databases, the opac interface, etc, these
can be modified differently. UBC Library recently modified its webpages for
a mobile version, but the database interfaces don't look that much
different. The OPAC interface and search methods do, however.
(library.ubc.ca)

http://www.mobify.me/ is a great website that modifies your existing web
pages and makes them mobile friendly. I believe the basic service is free,
but you can of course pay to have the more high-tech pages modified for a
fee.

Jessica Woolman


-- 
Jessica H Woolman, M.L.I.S.
Web Coordinator
Jessica.woolman at ubc.ca
--
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